🚀 A new era: Kirby 4 Get to know
Skip to content

Episode 22

06 Apr 2018

Originally published via email on April 6th, 2018.

Kirby 3 is progressing fast. Last week, we saw the release of Alpha 7 "DragonDrop" and Alpha 8 will come to supporters today.

The next Kirby Workshop will be held during btconf in DĂĽsseldorf on May 9, 2018. And guess what? You will learn how to build websites with the new shiny Kirby 3! The workshop will also cover how to transition websites from Kirby 2 to Kirby 3.

Kirby in the Wild

Paul Duncombe
Artist

RPPRT
Community Marketeers

Kirby Enhanced

  • As an alternative to Bastian Allgeier's Patterns plugin, Jens Törnell developed the Kirby Component Kit. It bundles controller, template, snippet, and other files that build a component together in a single folder (commercial).

  • While it is usually not regarded as a best practice to rely on user agent detection in Responsive Web Design, there might be times when it is necessary. For those occasions, Martin Folkers created the Kirby Device plugin. It detects user devices based on Matomo's Universal Device Detection library.

  • Migrating from ExpressionEngine to Kirby? Brian Warren's Post Chopper plugin chops your files up into files and folders for Kirby.

Always test third party plugins thoroughly before using them in production!

Kirby How-tos

Typography

  • Find out what's in a font file by dropping it into the FontDrop online app. It analyzes the file and shows you information about it like the name of the font, copyright data, its features, and more.

JavaScript

  • Umar Hansa explains a new Chrome Canary feature that allows you to replace existing Ajax calls in your codebase with the Fetch API by simply right-clicking on a network resource and selecting the option "Copy as Fetch" from the context menu.

  • InfiniteGrid is a JavaScript library that you can use to layout cards on a grid according to layout type. It compares to Masonry but claims a better performance (not tested).

Inclusive Design

  • Eileen Webb has written an article about why animations can cause motion sickness in users and what to do about it.

  • In the same line, Hugo Giraudel explains how you can implement a reduced motion mode in your website.

  • These are only two new examples that show how inclusive design is becoming more and more important for web developers, because it doesn't just mean to cater for a small number of people, but for everyone. Microsoft has a very good manual for downloadthat shows how physical abilities can be anything from situational to permanent.

Let me close this section with a quote from a talk by Charlie Owen:

... we have to defend the web for everybody. It’s our job to keep it accessible and usable for all ( Dear Developer, The Web Isn't About You)

This & That

  • Deviceframe is a command line tool with which you can quickly put a device frame around your app screenshots. You can use an image or an URL and select up to 52 devices at the time of writing. I've only done a quick test and the quality can certainly be improved in some places, but hey!

  • Speaking of the command line. If you are still new to and sort of afraid of it, here is a nice learning resource.

  • If you are a Windows user, Lunacy might be for you. It is a - free - native Windows app that can open, edit and store .sketch files.

  • The discussion about Facebook's data breach in the last weeks has brought the topic of privacy on the web up again, even though it sometimes seems that a majority of people doesn't really care. If you are concerned about your privacy but still want to use Facebook, you can at least use the Firefox browser with the Facebook container extension to make it harder for Facebook to track you across sites.