Episode 11
I'm back again from a short but sunny and active vacation on the beautiful island of Elba with the 11th episode of Kirby Kosmos.
Today, we have another reason to celebrate: Kirby Kosmos now has over 1000 subscribers! A lot of work goes into putting these episodes together every month, but it's fun and interesting as well. And if you like it, every single minute is worth the effort. Thanks everyone for your support, and keep on reading and developing.
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It's always inspiring to see what others are creating with Kirby. This month’s picks are again very different and very unique:
Fresh Kirby Plugins
This time I'd like to introduce you to a lot of stuff that is still in beta state, so these plugins are not for use in production yet. But if you are interested, check them out, report issues to their developers, or take your chance to file some feature requests while they are still in the making.
- Bruno Meilick's HTMLHead plugin provides page methods to automate inserting code into the HTML head via snippets (beta).
- Similar to the inbuilt structure field, but without the modal, that is what Jens Törnell's Engineer Field aims to be (beta, commercial).
- Kirby Ref by Florian Karsten is a wrapper for the php-ref library and offers an elaborate alternative to using
var_dump().
Shopkit v 2.0
Sam Nabi's E-Commerce solution Shopkit is now available in version 2.0. It features a new payment gateway and a new theme. Beta testers can get a free license (commercial).
Images Field
The Images field lets you drag&drop multiple images into a field, reorder them easily and even move images between multiple instances of its kind (beta). Made by Thomas Günther.
Preview Field
The Preview field shows a preview of a selected page in an iframe to allow users to copy and paste content into fields of a new page. Special preview templates can be defined (beta).
Themes
The number of ready-to-use themes for Kirby is growing constantly. Constantin Joly has just published no less than three! stylish Kirby themes for different purposes (commercial).
Tempo
Blog
Mima
Blog, Project, Personal
Variations
One-Pager
Sorting & grouping
Sorting and grouping of content collections is an everyday developer's task. This brand new cookbook recipe walks you through several use cases and how to solve them using Kirby's powerful API methods.
Case Study: Habita
Habita is an open and transparent coworking hub based in Istanbul, Turkey. Designer L Daniel Swakman walks us through the nuts and bolts of this breakthrough project built with Kirby.
Stay in control and send/receive transactional email from your own server with Postal, an open source mail delivery platform. May be an alternative to cloud solutions, but requires your own infrastructure and some knowledge and the right configuration to run smoothly and securely.
SVG
Chris Coyier has put together an extensive, commented list of SVG shape morphing tools & technologies.
Ajax
Most of us are probably used to using jQuery's ajax() method whenever we want to issue an AJAX call. Nowadays, we can use the Fetch API to do AJAX calls in an easy way without the need for additional libraries. This article has you covered.
CSS
CSS custom properties are CSS variables set as property names prefixed with -. They allow you to define a value once, and reuse it throughout a document can using the var( ) function. While this functionality is still experimental and browser support varies, these two articles on Smashing Magazine and CSS-Tricks will get you started and understand the differences between preprocessor variables and CSS custom properties.
Comments, but different
Many websites use Disqus to easily add comments to their blog. This article describes an alternative: Replacing Disqus with GitHub comments shares the reasons behind this decision, and how to implement it in a website. While the example is based on Hugo CMS, it will be easy to make it work with Kirby (maybe an idea for a future cookbook recipe). GitHub comments might not fit any kind of blog, but for the more technically oriented, this might be a great alternative.