I was recently invited to give a presentation on my thoughts about security best-practices for the Charlotte Craft CMS Developers Group. I ended up giving a high-level overview of what I believe are the most important things everyone must understand in order to build secure sites and software.
Insights to the world of content management.
July 27, 2022
Gone Phishing, Catch you Later
Stanford University runs a Phishing Awareness Program that aims to train participants in how to recognise, report and avoid phishing attacks. Given that email is the entry point for 91% of cyber attacks and therefore every organisation’s biggest vulnerability, perhaps we can all benefit from increasing our phishing awareness.
July 12, 2022
Adding Logging to Craft Plugins with Monolog
Logging plays an essential part in leaving an audit trail of what events take place in a CMS. Monolog is a logging library that ships with Craft CMS 4, which can be customised to make logs easier to read and parse when used in plugins and modules.
July 9, 2022
Requiring a Forked Repo with Composer
If you ever find yourself having to modify a Craft plugin, or any composer package for that matter, then you can do so using a fork. A fork is a copy of a repository that you manage. Forked repositories let you make changes to a package without affecting the original repository.
June 1, 2022
Building a RESTful API in Craft CMS
There are times when you want to make data and actions in Craft available to external services. Fortunately, Craft’s URL manager (or more accurately Yii’s) makes handling the routing of requests straightforward, so you can define and route your API endpoints with just a few lines of code.
May 24, 2022
Securing Your Craft Site in 2022—Part 3
The infamous Murphy’s Law states that “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong”. Having an up-to-date security policy helps ensure that there are steps in place to prevent a catastrophe and that you can react responsibly if and when things do go south.
May 16, 2022
Ballroom Blitz
After 2 years and over 2,500 active installs in the plugin store, we’ve decided that the time is finally right to bring templating performance hints, previously provided by the Blitz Recommendations plugin, directly into Blitz. There is now no excuse for not eager-loading elements in your Twig templates, as the new utility keeps track of opportunities as pages are visited and tells you about them!
April 18, 2022
Plugin Roadmap 2022
With the release of Craft 4, we’re rolling out major version releases of all our plugins, including some big features in Blitz and Campaign. Our release schedule will fall into step with that of Craft CMS, as will our maintenance and support periods.
November 30, 2021
A First Look at _hyperscript
_hyperscript is a scripting language for adding interactivity to the front-end. You guessed it, yet another JavaScript library. But what makes hyperscript unique is that it provides a natural language syntax for optimal readability, reusability and maintainability, arguably the most important qualities of any “programming” language.
October 31, 2021
Common Security Vulnerabilities in Craft CMS Plugins
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: never trust user input. This is one of the golden rules of security, yet when designing plugin APIs, we often tend to favour flexibility over restriction, which can get us into trouble if we are unaware of the data or endpoints we are exposing.
October 5, 2021
Bridging the Phases of a Web Project, with Kyle Cotter of Happy Cog
I recently sat down with Kyle Cotter, Author Experience Lead at Happy Cog, to hear about the process of building and launching Canary Media on Craft CMS. It turns out that the bridging of the discovery, design, development and DevOps phases is what stands out as the most intriguing thing about this project. And by the end of it, Kyle has me convinced that a successful project is one in which each phase receives the attention it needs, the tasks are rigorously prioritised and the features that make it into launch and those that don’t are, once decided, indisputable.
July 6, 2021
Storing Secrets in Craft CMS
The most secure way of preventing secrets from being revealed is, well, not storing them at all. But assuming you need to access sensitive secrets in your PHP code, such as credentials to an online bank account, then storing them encrypted is much more secure than in plaintext.
May 10, 2021
Leveraging Craft CMS Plugins for Horizontal Growth
Having spent a decent portion of my career building client sites, one thing that always struck me as dangerous was the unsustainable cycle that web agencies tend to fall into. Chasing the next big project, rather than producing the best quality work, often becomes the primary objective of stakeholders. Avoiding this trap is possible by focusing on “horizontal” growth and one way to do this is by leveraging plugins.
May 4, 2021
Securing Front-End User Profile and Entry Forms in Craft
Every Craft site that allows public registration implicitly grants its users elevated privileges. Specifically, users have the ability to update all custom fields on their profile, as well as in any entries that they have permission to edit. If you use custom fields for “private” admin use only, then you may be leaving your site open to abuse.
April 13, 2021
Snaptcha 3 Released
Snaptcha 3 adds more control over which form submissions and users to validate, as well as a fail-safe method for dealing with false negatives (submissions that are incorrectly believed to be spam).
February 5, 2021
PHP 7.3, 7.4 and 8.0 Security Release
If you host any sites on a VPS that you manage then this PHP security update very likely affects you. The severity of the update is unclear, but fortunately, it is a simple patch.
January 26, 2021
Securing Your Craft Site in 2021—Part 2
Using software you trust is key to increasing your chances of keeping your site secure and lowering the chances of introducing a vulnerability. But how exactly do you know which software (and developers) are trustworthy and which are not?
January 20, 2021
Stepping Up Security with Sherlock 3
Security is one of those things that can be difficult to prioritise on a client project. Today we released Sherlock 3 which aims to change that. It’s time to start taking security seriously.
January 13, 2021
Securing Your Craft Site in 2021—Part 1
Cybersecurity often feels like another world, yet in recent years it’s a topic that I’ve become mildly obsessed with. As web and software developers, security is an integral part of what we do, but for the most part it is self-contained in terms of the code that we work on directly. That has to change.
November 23, 2020
Sprig 1.1.0 adds Features & Security
Sprig 1.1.0 adds new features as well as some important security improvements. Most notably, Sprig now uses htmx 0.4.0 and adds template variables to paginate element queries, push URLs into the history stack, redirect and refresh the browser, trigger client-side events and more securely add values to a request.
November 9, 2020
Sprig and the Joy of HTML
I love the simplicity of HTML. Take a web site from 1999 and it will still render in a modern web browser. Sure, it will look antiquated, but it will work. HTML is the backbone of the web and it is making a comeback as a language.
December 10, 2019
Blitz 3 – Embracing the JAMstack
Blitz 3 brings innovations and features that empower you to be the Jedi developer that you are. Deploy bat-out-of-hell-fast sites using Twig and your favourite Craft plugins, serving them from edge CDNs with continuous deployment, version control and one-click rollbacks.
November 29, 2019
Deploying a Craft site to Netlify with Blitz 3
Using the Git Deployer that comes with Blitz 3, you can now set up Craft CMS to automatically deploy to Netlify Edge (the super-charged CDN). The entire process takes around 20 minutes, excluding DNS propagation time.
October 15, 2019
Blitz 3 is Here: “Hello, JAMstack”
Blitz 3 is here (in public beta) and allows you to bring your Jedi Twig templating skills to the JAMstack!!
September 25, 2019
Takeaways from Dot All in Montréal
Dot All 2019 recently wrapped up and it did not disappoint!! Dubbed “the JAMstack conference” by attendees, there were some big announcements like Craft CMS 4 and Craft Cloud. All in all though, this conference was about the people, their stories and the community.
September 11, 2019
How The Web Moves On, And Doesn't
Today we are overjoyed to launch a new major redesign. Huge thanks to Seamus Holman, Sarah Waring and Jana Grabner for helping to make this a reality!!
8 years ago today we revealed our first major redesign to the PutYourLightsOn brand. To my surprise, while taking a trip down memory lane, I realised that even though the web has really moved on since then, design really hasn’t that much.
April 15, 2019
A Technical Rundown of How Project Config Works
As of Craft 3.1.0, “Project Config” is a thing. Here’s a technical rundown of how it works.
March 20, 2019
Understanding Project Config in Craft CMS
Craft CMS 3.1 introduces some big features, most noticably Project Config. Project Config is a configuration setting which, when enabled, turns a .yaml file into the single source of truth for a site’s schema.
November 22, 2018
Static File Caching with Craft CMS 3, aka The Best Of Both Worlds
In a recent redesign of the PutYourLightsOn website, we decided to start with a blank slate. It became an excellent opportunity to re-evaluate the state of web publishing tools in 2018 with the aim of utilising the best possible means to build a lightning-fast site that would still enable a great authoring experience.
October 15, 2018
The Mystery of Presenting at Tech Conferences Revealed
This article was written after the DotAll Conference 2018. The developer community I refer to is the incredibly supportive Craft CMS community.
From The Archives #
October 1, 2014
Upcoming ExpressionEngine Conference
In just a few days I will find myself amongst my peers at the biggest ExpressionEngine event of the year, and I couldn’t be more excited about it. A lot has happened in the CMS world over the past year and I feel that the conference is a great way to come to terms with some of these changes and to “check in” with the community and with the team behind EE.
September 3, 2014
Craft Plugins Launched
Today marks the beginning of an exciting time for us. We have just taken 2 of our Craft CMS plugins, Snaptcha and Sitemap, out of private beta, and the 1.0.0 releases are now available.
March 4, 2014
Add-on Support Visualised
Lately I’ve become more aware of a pattern that seems to be quite common among software within the ExpressionEngine community, and it not only appears within third-party add-ons but stems all the way from the core product itself.
June 18, 2013
Multi Language Module Now Free For Everyone
The Multi Language Module has been free for non-profit organisations since it’s release nearly 4 years ago, but as of today we are making it a free add-on for personal and commercial use as well.
June 12, 2013
Sponsoring ExpressionEngine Conference 2013
PutYourLightsOn is proud to be an official sponsor of the ExpressionEngine Conference 2013!! The conference will take place on the 14th and 15th of October in Portland, Oregon, and has a great line up of speakers.
May 28, 2013
Why I’m So Excited About Craft (and why you should be)
In the past couple of weeks I’ve spent more and more time playing with Craft, the new CMS by Pixel & Tonic. When I say playing with, I mean working with, but since it is proving to be such a joy to use, I feel that “playing” is a more appropriate word.
May 22, 2013
EEUK & Open API Revealed
I had the pleasure of revealing Open API, my latest creation for ExpressionEngine, in my presentation at EEUK 2013. Open API is a front-end, http-based API for ExpressionEngine that provides authentication and CRUD (create/read/update/delete) functionality to content and data in the CMS.
December 13, 2012
All Add-on Income Donated On 13.12.11
To celebrate the large success of Expresso and our other add-ons this year, all income from sales of all PutYourLightsOn add-ons today (13.12.11) will be donated to charity (supporting education programs in West Africa).
December 11, 2012
End of Year Round-up
2012 seems to have flown by rather quickly but it has been an action-packed year. We released three add-ons this year, two of which have been nominated for the devot-ee AcademEE Awards. We attended EECI Europe and I had the honour of speaking at EECI U.S.
October 22, 2012
EECI US 2012
I was lucky enough to go to both EECI’s this year, the European one in Leiden and the US one near Austin which happened last week. In fact I was invited to speak at the US one and felt very honoured to present to my fellow EE community members. I gave a talk on the developer’s track and it was a full house, standing room only!!
February 29, 2012
Visualising Devot-ee Sales
If like me you sell your ExpressionEngine add-ons on devot-ee then you are definitely familiar with the sales reports page. It gives a quick overview and tabular report of the selected month’s sales. But if you want to properly analyse your sales then you simply need to visualise them. I’ve written a small php script to do just that and frankly I’ve surprised myself with how insightful it is.
January 22, 2012
Responsive CP Finally Released
Responsive CP is an ExpressionEngine theme that I started working on over a year ago but that I only released to the public as a free add-on last week. You may have already noticed it in the various screenshots of our add-ons. The theme has two main goals – to provide a more professional looking control panel and to work well on desktop as well as mobile devices with small to medium screen sizes.
October 31, 2011
Highlights of EECI 2011
Wow what a week! EECI in Brooklyn was a huge success and the ExpressionEngine event of the year. Great speakers, great people, great organisation and an amazing venue! Below are some of my personal highlights.
September 11, 2011
Another Year, Another Redesign
Another year has past and since the summer a redesign of PutYourLightsOn has been in the works. Today I am proud to finally make it live!