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.
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
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
Ran the test again with gzip enabled for event streams and I’m getting a compression ratio of 30:1. Pretty sweet for a one-line config change.
August 20, 2025 at 11:57 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
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
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
Datastar has since added `data-replace-url`, an `executescript` SSE event, and the ability to load plugins during runtime – everything you need to build custom history functionality. I still question the value of this in practice, though.
March 8, 2025 at 3:41 PM
Here’s a teaser of something I’m going to demo in tomorrow’s @craftquest.io livestream. I think you’ll want to see it!
#CraftCMS
craftquest.io/livestreams
February 19, 2025 at 7:12 PM
This example was shown using the PHP SDK. Not a long-lived connection, but one that stays alive only as long as it needs to.

Configuring the backend to stop processing the request if the browser window is closed as as easy as adding a single line of code.
January 28, 2025 at 10:11 PM
All Datastar SDKs will soon ship with a “Hello, world!” example that demonstrates fragments being streamed to the browser in a single response–all in just a few lines of code.

Here you can see the DOM updates on the left, and the SSE events being streamed on the right.
January 28, 2025 at 1:48 AM
Kicked off 2025 by releasing Datastar v1.0.0-beta.1 🚀

After a grueling couple of months, Delaney and I are delighted to finally tag a stable API that is as close to perfection as we can possibly imagine.

Datastar is reactivity made declarative.

Release notes: github.com/starfederati...
January 2, 2025 at 5:42 PM
Sorry Alpine.js, but this is *not* the way. Declarative hypermedia with Datastar is *the* way.
data-star.dev/guide/gettin...
December 17, 2024 at 7:23 PM