Episode 2
Over the last month since our first Kirby Kosmos episode the community has been really busy creating lots of extensions for Kirby. In this second edition, we'll feature some of these exciting new plugins. Big thanks to everyone who has contributed to making Kirby better and more versatile every day! You are awesome.
If you want to get Kirby Kosmos delivered to your email inbox monthly, feel free to subscribe!
News
- Since the last episode of Kirby Kosmos, we published two new Kirby releases, Kirby 2.3.1 and 2.3.2. Make sure to update for some great improvements and bug fixes.
- PHP 5.5 is now end of life, which means that there will be no security updates for it in the future. Make sure to use at least PHP 5.6 – or take the opportunity to upgrade to PHP 7 to benefit from its improved performance!
Kirby Plugins
- The Auto Git plugin by Pedro Borges uses Kirby's Panel hooks to commit changes to the content automatically. Use it to store a history of your site, to check who changed what, as a backup or as the foundation of a deployment setup. Or maybe as all of those at the same time.
- Tim Ötting's Gallery field provides a visual way for users to select images for use in a gallery. Also useful if you want to have more than one gallery on a page.
- Here's another plugin by Kirby team member Fabian Michael, the ImageKit plugin. It provides an asynchronous thumbnail API that can be used to generate thumbs at the first request for a much snappier user experience. Currently in beta.
- Do you plan to use Kirby as an API that can be consumed by other applications? Then make sure to check out the JSON API plugin, which really simplifies this task.
- Modular content makes your site more flexible and customizable. Now, there's an official plugin that helps with this, the Modules plugin. Lukas Kleinschmidt used it as the foundation for his Modules field, which makes the plugin even easier to use for clients.
Events
- The CodeCats initiative wants to teach young people how to code. In August, Nico will spend a weekend teaching Kirby at Zeppelin University in Friedrichshafen, Germany. A great idea that will certainly find advocates.
Themes
- Konstantin's Siimple theme was built from scratch just for Kirby. Looks beautiful and is very flexible.
JS
- Embedding beautiful maps is a pain if you don't want to use Google's APIs. Leaflet is an open-source JS library that can be used with different data providers and supports a lot of drawing and visualization features.
HTML
- Did you know that you can create web forms that allow users to scan their credit cards in Safari on iOS? Autofill is behind that and it also supports many other field types.
- There are so many and tags you can put into your that it becomes hard to decide which to use and which to avoid. Josh Buchea has created a cheat sheet of head tags to help.
Developer Tools
- GIFs are sometimes very useful for short screencasts to explain a problem or to demonstrate a process. Chris Coyier has collected some tools to make GIF screencasts.
Powered by Kirby
We'd like to share with you a few of the many new great websites powered by Kirby which went online over the last couple of weeks. These are all so amazing.
And one more thing: We have restructured the docs for you. The "cookbook" unites the former solutions and all tutorials from the blog in one unified and filterable section. And this is just the beginning, we will update and extend the section in the future. Stay tuned! (Let us know how you like it, and if you find any broken links or bugs, don't hesitate to notify us.)
That's it for this month's episode of Kirby Kosmos.
We hope you enjoy it. Feel free to send us feedback in the forum or on Twitter.
Cheers,
Sonja & Lukas from the Kirby team