Xplain for Craft CMS

Installation

Requirements

  • Craft CMS 5.3 or later
  • PHP 8.2 or later

No database tables, no outbound requests, no runtime dependencies beyond Craft.

Install

composer require justinholtweb/craft-xplain
php craft plugin/install xplain

On install Xplain queues one job that writes a tip for every field already in a field layout. If you would rather look first:

php craft xplain/tips/write --dry-run

prints every tip it would write, and changes nothing.

What changes in your project

Xplain writes to project config, the same way you would by typing a tip into the field layout designer:

  • each layout element it explains gets a tip: line in its entry type's (or volume's, or category group's…) YAML file, and
  • project.yaml gets an xplain.tips map — a hash of every tip Xplain wrote, keyed by the layout element's UID. That map is how Xplain tells its own tips from yours.

Commit both like any other schema change. On environments where allowAdminChanges is off, Xplain writes nothing: the tips arrive with project-config/apply.

Editions

Xplain is free. There are no editions and no licence key.

Uninstalling

Uninstalling removes Xplain's own tips — only those still exactly as it wrote them — and its ledger. Hand-written tips and tips you edited stay. To keep Xplain's tips after uninstalling, remove the xplain.tips ledger from project config first; they are then ordinary tips.