Blaster for Craft CMS
Installation
Requirements
- Craft CMS 5.3 or later
- PHP 8.2 or later
That is the whole list. Blaster has no runtime dependencies beyond Craft's own, no build step, and makes no outbound HTTP request anywhere — not at install, not on a page view, not ever.
Blaster is free. There are no editions, no licence key and no licensing code in the plugin.
Install
composer require justinholtweb/craft-blaster
php craft plugin/install blaster
Or find Blaster in the Plugin Store and install it there.
Installing creates three tables — blaster_bars, blaster_bar_content and blaster_stats — and
adds a Bars item to the control panel navigation. No project config is written until you
change a setting.
Your first bar
- Bars → New bar.
- Give it a name and a handle. The handle is what the browser remembers a dismissal under, so
pick something you will not want to rename later —
spring-sale, notbar-1. - Write the message. It is rich text, cleaned by HTML Purifier on save, and it is per-site: a multi-site install translates the wording without duplicating the bar.
- Choose a position — top or bottom.
- Save.
The bar is live from that moment, on every front-end page of the site, because a new bar targets everything by default. Load the front end and it is there.
Nothing was added to a template to make that happen. Blaster splices matching bars into front-end
HTML responses just before the closing </body> tag.
Statuses
A bar shows one of four statuses in the element index, and only the first of them appears on the site:
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Live | Enabled, and either unscheduled or inside its scheduled window |
| Pending | Enabled, but its start date has not arrived |
| Expired | Enabled, but its end date has passed |
| Disabled | Switched off by hand |
Pending and expired are computed from the schedule's start and end dates, which are stored on the bar's own row rather than inside its JSON configuration — that is what lets the element index sort and filter on status without loading every bar.
Permissions
Three permissions ship with the plugin, all under Blaster in the user group settings:
| Permission | Allows |
|---|---|
| View bars | See the Bars section |
| Create and edit bars | Add and change bars, including per-bar custom CSS |
| Delete bars | Remove bars |
Create and edit bars is a trusted permission. Custom CSS is written into every page a bar appears on, so give it to the people you would give template access to.
Where to go next
- Configuration — the plugin settings, and what the defaults assume
- Usage — targeting, scheduling, theming, Twig and the console
- Troubleshooting — when a bar does not appear