Dot All Lisbon 2025 was as invigorating and lively as the city it was held in. I gave a talk entitled “Real-time Collaboration” in which I introduced Datastar and showed several interactive demos with audience participation.
Ben Croker presenting Datastar at Dot All 2025. Photo by Klaus Dudas.
The main reason I go to conferences is that I leave feeling energised, inspired, and motivated (and, if I’m honest, exhausted after speaking with so many people over just a few days).
This year’s Craft CMS conference, held in an incredible location in the Praça do Comércio (Lisbon’s main riverside plaza and historically the royal palace), was packed with great talks and a big announcement from the Pixel & Tonic team.
Craft 6 will run on Laravel #
Craft 6 is being rewritten to run on Laravel instead of Yii. More importantly, Craft 6 is a full port to Laravel.
This is exciting because it not only means that Craft’s codebase will be modernised to take full advantage of Laravel’s ecosystem and PHP 8.4’s features, but also that Craft itself will now be installed as a dependency within your Laravel app. This is a significant shift: until now, Craft has always been the foundation of the app, with everything else built around it.
Authoring features such as content releases and approval workflows, scheduled drafts, edit-page commenting, and more are coming too, and were covered in the official announcement.
Real-time Collaboration with Datastar #
I’ve dedicated over a year of my time to the open-source Datastar project, and I was delighted to introduce it to the audience during my talk entitled Real-time Collaboration with Sprig and Datastar.
Datastar is a tiny framework for building everything from simple sites to real-time collaborative web apps. Datastar “solves” the frontend for me, meaning it can take you from zero to 100% in terms of frontend/backend reactivity.
By reducing the conceptual complexity of frontend development, Datastar frees up space and time to be creative on the backend, which is where the really interesting things can happen. In my talk I explained backend technologies and approaches such as Server-Sent Events, CQRS, Pub/Sub Messaging, and Event Sourcing, and demonstrated how they can be used together to create real-time collaborative web applications.
The “art piece” above was created by 74 members of the audience during one of the demos (all of which were running in a live production environment). All I did was press the stop button. Apparently that makes me the artist, and the audience my paint!
Other Talks Worth Mentioning #
There were plenty more talks worth mentioning. I’ll cover just a few of my highlights below. See CraftQuest’s coverage for a more complete overview.
How we scaled Craft Commerce to handle 1,000+ orders per hour #
In this talk, Egil Fujikawa Nes shared how the 600-developer-strong company 99x Solutions built and launched Interflora Norway’s online shop. This platform handles order fulfillment for over 400 independent flower shops across Norway and connects to a global network in 150 countries.
The site makes heavy use of Blitz for performance, Sprig for reactivity, and Craft Commerce for the e‑commerce side of things. According to Egil, the combination results in their product pages (arguably their most important pages) loading significantly faster than those of their competitors.
Accessible Image Editing #
This lightning talk by Lupe Camacho, Pixel & Tonic’s Senior Accessibility Engineer, was a fascinating behind-the-scenes look into solving keyboard and screen reader accessibility when cropping images and setting the focal point in Craft 5.8. Oh, and it works with voice control too!
Pitched Perfect: Selling Craft CMS to non-technical stakeholders #
Daniel Hammond shared webdna’s approach to selling Craft by “knowing” the client and understanding their specific needs before setting them up for success. According to Daniel, asking “why” questions is particularly important, as clients often don’t know (how to communicate) what they want, nor what they really need.
AI or Bust(ed): Why ‘Adapt or Be Replaced’ Is a False Choice #
This was a deeply reflective and somewhat eerie talk by Travis Gertz, Pixel & Tonic’s DevRel Engineer. Throughout the talk, there was a subliminal yet palpable message in the way members of the audience were repositioning themselves around the room as the sunbeams gradually moved from the front to the back, while Travis discussed web developers finding their place in a rapidly changing world.
