Blitz 3 is here (in public beta) and allows you to bring your Jedi Twig templating skills to the JAMstack!!
Before we get into the details, let’s clarify a few things about what this major version update could mean to you.
- Are you happy using Blitz for static page caching, with or without a reverse proxy purger? Great, carry on building bat-out-of-hell-fast sites your way.
- Want to take advantage of JAMstack technologies and the benefits they offer such as edge hosting, continuous deployment and one-click rollbacks, without having to give up your Twig templates and beloved live preview? You can now do that by using the new remote deployment feature in Blitz.
- Prefer a hybrid approach whereby your site’s static pages are served by a static host such as Netlify and dynamic pages and forms are handled by Craft? You can now do that too… the possibilities seem endless!!
Will Browar of Dixon Schwabl had this to say upon hearing about the update:
“Blitz 3 gives us an alternative to going all-in on JAMstack technologies. Remote Deployment lets our Craft sites go headless and gives us the security and performance of hosting our sites on a CDN, while letting us continue to write the front-end in Twig. It’s nice to know we have another option available to us.”
Remote Deployment #
Remote Deployment is a new feature in Blitz that allows your site to be automatically and continuously deployed to Netlify, ZEIT Now, GitHub Pages or any remote location. Blitz ships with a “Git Deployer” which will automatically commit and push any updated content in Craft to GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket or any Git provider. As with all other features in Blitz, we’ve made it easy for you to extend and bring your own custom deployer.
Watch how seamless and easy deploying a page from a local Craft install to Netlify is:
Cache Warmers #
Cache warming is now handled by Cache Warmers. The default cache warming functionality is handled by the “Guzzle Warmer” that ships with Blitz and you can now extend it and bring your own custom warmer. This gives you more control over the details of how the cache is warmed. For example, you could write your own custom logic for warming the cache gradually as to reduce the load on the server, or you could offload the warming process to a serverless AWS Lambda function. You can now also specify custom URIs that Craft doesn’t know about but that should be warmed.
Other Features #
A new utility has been added which allows you to refresh one or more cached URLs. Performance and user interface improvements have been made in the control panel, along with improved user group permissions, event handling and logging. Read the full changelog.
Price Change #
With the release of Blitz 3, we have changed the plugin license price from $59 to $99 (and the renewal price from $29 to $49). We don’t like increasing our prices, but Blitz has grown from its initial release as a simple caching plugin to something that is immensely powerful, feature-rich and cost-saving. We have justified the price change for the following reasons.
- Blitz takes 2 minutes to install and makes your site instantly faster and more performant, saving you tens of hours of development time trying to squeeze performance out of Craft.
- Blitz saves your clients hundreds if not thousands of dollars in hosting fees every year by requiring much fewer (and cheaper) server resources.
- Blitz is extensible in almost every way, allowing you to add custom functionality for almost any use-case you can dream up.
Appeal to Developers #
We want to see every Craft site perform as best as it possibly can. If you are a web agency or freelancer that builds sites for clients then your own site should be an example of everything that is great about Craft. It is the first thing that potential clients will see and it should not disappoint. We believe you should be proud of your site and use it to demo the Craft control panel and authoring experience.
For that reason, we are making a bold offer to web agencies and freelance developers:
Contribute to the Blitz 3 beta (through pull requests or general feedback) and we will grant you a license of Blitz to use on your own site for $0.
This applies to web agencies and freelance developers who have built one or more sites using Craft. Just send a quick note to support@putyourlightson.com telling us a bit about your company and what it does (in general and in relation to Craft CMS) and we’ll issue a license to your Craft ID account.