2013-2014

Growing pains

With a growing community and growing attention, feature requests and ideas came more frequently. The typical growing pains emerged. The first version was pretty rough around the edges. The Panel had limited possibilities. Support took more time than anticipated and juggling client projects became harder every day.

Fortunately, Kirby started to generate more revenue and so I decided to hire the first freelancer to help me with the website, docs and support. In March 2014, Sascha Lack joined me and did an amazing job with the website, while I was able to focus on the development for Kirby 2. Sascha was one of the first Kirby customers and the developer of two popular themes (baseblog and smart projects) for Kirby 1. It was great to have a true community member on board.

v2

Despite Sascha's help, it took months to finish version 2. I decided to rewrite large parts from scratch and especially the Panel turned into an entirely different system. Feedback can be a blessing and a curse, and trying to meet expectations with such a major new version meant a lot of pressure. The new version took quite a long time, but finally launched on October 7th, 2014.

The new Panel was still a very traditional web app. Views were completely server-rendered and navigation was sped up with Ajax requests. Good old jQuery helped with all kinds of interactive features. What started quite simple, blew up into a pretty unmanageable monster over the years.

With Kirby 2, the capabilities of the system rose to a completely different level and the old pricing model didn’t seem fitting any more. Instead of the former €30 general license, we introduced two new tiers: A personal license for €19 and a professional license for €79.

We expected a backlash because of the changed prices, but the feedback was very positive overall.