Ben Croker
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bencroker.com
Ben Croker
@bencroker.com
Craft CMS plugin developer, builder of shiny tools;
modern day drifter, adventurous fool.
We had @andersmurphy.bsky.social back on the pod to discuss his One Billion Checkboxes and other demos.
youtu.be/DFYuHGKMit8
Billionaire Anders Murphy
YouTube video by Datastar
youtu.be
October 28, 2025 at 12:10 PM
Going back to fundamentals and building a completely custom merch store using Datastar and Go has been extremely gratifying.
Here’s the end result.
data-star.dev/shop
Shop
Official not-a-cult shop.
data-star.dev
October 27, 2025 at 7:12 PM
Blinksy just learned to redraw itself on Checkboxes when things get out of sync.

It has achieved sentience.

I am now obsolete.
October 15, 2025 at 2:27 PM
Datastar demos have started cross-pollinating. Soon they’ll form a hive mind and ship the next release themselves.
Blinksy: play.putyourlightson.com/blinksy
Checkboxes: checkboxes.andersmurphy.com?x=1312&y=1310
October 14, 2025 at 6:59 AM
Dot All 2025 was a wonderful event (big thanks to @leahstephenson.bsky.social and the entire @craftcms.com crew)!!
In case you missed it, here’s my recap.
putyourlightson.com/articles/dot...
Dot All 2025 Recap
Dot All 2025 was as invigorating and lively as the city it was held in: Lisbon. I gave a talk entitled ​“Real-time Collaboration” in which I introduced…
putyourlightson.com
October 1, 2025 at 1:18 PM
This feels like the right move and the right way to make it happen. Great decision!!
We announced our plans for Craft 6 at last week’s Dot All conference in Lisbon.

The big news: we’re switching to Laravel!

craftcms.com/blog/laravel #CraftCMS
Craft’s Going Laravel | Craft CMS
We’re switching to the Laravel PHP framework for Craft 6!
craftcms.com
September 30, 2025 at 10:52 AM
Having a blast making some final demos for my upcoming #CraftCMS talk at Dot All Lisbon 🇵🇹, using Datastar.
September 10, 2025 at 10:24 AM
My upcoming #CraftCMS Dot All conference talk will feature real-time demos with audience participation. This is me load testing 100 virtual users, each clicking on a random cell to toggle it on/off every 1 second. The CPU purrs along at 100% and memory remains well within capacity.
August 28, 2025 at 9:57 AM
Just published a Datastar & #CraftCMS Demo site with source code for common patterns such as live search, pagination, load more, and filters.
craftcms.data-star.dev
Datastar & Craft CMS Demos
Demos and source code for common patterns such as live search, pagination, load more, and filters.
craftcms.data-star.dev
August 28, 2025 at 7:45 AM
Load testing a VPS ahead of my upcoming #CraftCMS conference talk, in which I’ll be inviting audience participation. This tests up to 100 users hitting the server every second for 30s. Datastar has no problem receiving almost 90MB in over 1k events, and the server purrs along at 100% CPU.
August 19, 2025 at 4:45 PM
Inspector... Rocket... Stellar... Laravel... you’d think we were building a spaceship instead of a frontend framework!
youtu.be/AH1-1BIR2wk
Datastar Tooling
YouTube video by Datastar
youtu.be
August 16, 2025 at 5:02 PM
I love simple, transparent benchmarks, and this one doesn’t disappoint: measuring the time to swap large numbers of DOM elements.
The repo can be forked and tests varied thanks to excellent work by Zach Williams 🚀
github.com/zachwill/ben...
July 31, 2025 at 4:10 PM
Great conversation with @data-star.dev on launching Datastar V1 🚀
youtu.be/u0I7f6NMZvk
Datastar V1: Everything you need to know about the full-stack framework of the future
YouTube video by hypermedia-tv
youtu.be
July 21, 2025 at 12:36 PM
A big shout out to @arcustech.com for supporting the cause by sponsoring Datastar with a 2 GB, 2 core, self-hosted VPS, which has been performing exceptionally well with all the traffic recently received 🚀
Home Page - Arcustech
ArcusTech.com
July 16, 2025 at 3:09 PM
The Datastar package for @laravel.com has been updated with all the goodies that shipped in Datastar v1.0.0-RC.1. Read the release notes (some breaking changes included) and check out the new docs 🚀
github.com/putyourlight...
GitHub - putyourlightson/laravel-datastar: A reactive hypermedia framework for Laravel.
A reactive hypermedia framework for Laravel. Contribute to putyourlightson/laravel-datastar development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com
July 15, 2025 at 6:38 PM
The Datastar plugin for @craftcms.com has been updated for all the goodies that shipped in Datastar v1.0.0-RC.1. Read the release notes (some breaking changes included) and check out the new docs 🚀
putyourlightson.com/plugins/data...
Datastar – A template-driven, reactive hypermedia framework for Craft.
This plugin integrates the Datastar framework with Craft CMS, allowing you to create reactive frontends driven by Twig templates. It aims to replace the…
putyourlightson.com
July 15, 2025 at 5:31 PM
Louis Sunchine is livestreaming a Datastar V1 release party 🎉
Come hang out!!
www.twitch.tv/arum_titan
arum_titan - Twitch
Chill pre-live then V1 RELEASE!
www.twitch.tv
July 10, 2025 at 5:01 PM
It finally happened – we launched the new Datastar site and V1 (RC) 🚀
It’s been an incredible journey, and I feel honoured to be working with people like @data-star.dev and Johnny Stevers. And there’s so much more yet to come!!
data-star.dev
July 10, 2025 at 8:28 AM
In which we discuss internal changes that are making everything better, while pushing to make everything ready for a public release candidate of Datastar...
youtu.be/tNH3Tyc1s1k
Everything is fine
YouTube video by Datastar
youtu.be
June 25, 2025 at 3:39 PM
We discussed making Datastar videos and building demos with the very French, very upbeat Louis Sunshine 🇫🇷☀️
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ib0n...
Collecting Dragon Balls, with Louis Sunshine
YouTube video by Datastar
www.youtube.com
June 2, 2025 at 10:03 AM
Datastar is developed and maintained by a handful of core contributors and backed by Star Federation—a nonprofit organization.
We added the ability to sponsor our work just a few days ago, and WOW is the community showing its support!!
Take a peek 👀
github.com/sponsors/sta...
Sponsor @starfederation on GitHub Sponsors
Support the development and ongoing maintenance of Datastar and our other open-source work.
github.com
May 20, 2025 at 1:47 PM
To become a billionaire:
Step 1: Become a millionaire.
Step 2: Do that 999 more times.
Easy. #datastar
One Billion Checkboxes ✅

Change log:

- 100000% more checkboxes
- Cross platform universal check boxes
- Client side feedback animation (no optimistic updates)
- Tab state
- SQLITE storage (If your checkbox is checked it's been persisted to disk)

checkboxes.andersmurphy.com
checkboxes.andersmurphy.com
May 12, 2025 at 10:13 PM
The Blitz Hints utility, first introduced three years ago, has been retired in version 5.10.0. #CraftCMS
putyourlightson.com/articles/one...
One Last Hint: Eager-Load All the Things
The Blitz Hints utility, first introduced three years ago, has been retired in 5.10.0.
putyourlightson.com
May 1, 2025 at 5:57 PM
In this episode we discussed the Game of Life demo that was featured on Hacker News with Anders Murphy, Clojure, and making the most of Datastar.
(Also on the podcast players.)
#datastar #hypermedia #clojure
youtu.be/xzC3g0qIRro
Anders and the Game of Life
YouTube video by Datastar
youtu.be
April 22, 2025 at 3:22 PM
In this episode we discussed surviving Hacker News, and spoke with Johnny “Zignals” about getting more performance out of less code.
#datastar #hypermedia #framework
youtu.be/x_Hu30V01iY
Johnny Zignals: more perf, less code
YouTube video by Datastar
youtu.be
April 18, 2025 at 10:57 PM