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    Episode 37

    09 Aug 2019

    Although life usually slows down a bit during the summer months and Bastian was away on a highly deserved vacation with his family, Kirby development sleepeth not:

    Release 3.2.3

    Kirby 3.2.3 is out with some important bug fixes, including a fix for our brute-force protection feature that we further improved in the process. We therefore recommend you update your Kirby installation to this new version.

    Kirby Editor

    đŸ„ We have a big surprise for you this month. Something many of you have been longing for is coming: Kirby Editor, a new type of WYSIWYG editor for Kirby. It's a mixture between a regular WYSIWYG and a block editor that brings together the best parts of both worlds in a user-friendly interface. And best of all: you can extend it with your own block plugins. Editor is a plugin for Kirby and you can test the beta now.

    Kirby docs

    Our docs have a new chapter about Kirby & Privacy. Check it out when you are about to finalize your privacy page. And we extended our Virtual Pages guide with an example of integrating content from an RSS feed.

    Annotated Starterkit

    The Starterkit is now completely annotated with comments in blueprints, templates and snippets, including links to the documentation. This will hopefully make it a lot easier for beginners to get started.

    Kirby in the Wild

    Levon Biss

    Kirby Plugins

    Believe it or not, but the list of new plugins created during the summer heatwave is also impressive:

    The Kirby template hooks plugin lets you create hooks on a per template basis. Useful if you need different hooks depending on page type.

    With the Kirby Tester plugin you can easily write tests for Kirby plugins.

    Facilitate A/B testing with the "plug&play" Kirby ABT plugin.

    The Filesdisplay plugin brings a query property to files sections, so that you can filter files from anywhere–no upload, though.

    If you need to integrate Arena channels into your website, check out the Kirby Arena plugin.

    When using a lot of plugins, you can categorize them in separate folders for easier management with Kirby Loader.

    Always test third-party plugins thoroughly before using them in production.

    Bayerische LandesÀrztekammer

    Kirby Tips & Tricks

    Did you know that Kirby has the very handy or() field method to render a fallback value if a field is empty?

    <?= $page->myField()->or('Some fallback text') ?>

    Instead of hardcoding fallback text, you can of course also fall back to a required field.

    Images

    In When to srcset, Jens Oliver Meiert discusses the pros and cons of different ways to embed responsive images.

    Chrome now ships with native lazy-loading and hopefully other browser vendors will follow to make our lives as devs easier. In the meantime, we have to provide different solutions for different targets, as always


    A11y

    Eric Eggert about how to make CSS generated content accessible.

    "Everyone makes mistakes, and I’m certainly not exempt from making them. Fortunately, digital technology—and especially the web—allows us to make good on our errors and missteps quickly and with minimal cost."
    (Eric W. Bailey in Truths about digital accessibility)

    Performance

    Learn how rel=preconnect and rel=dns-prefetch resource hints improve perceived page speed in this article by Milica Mihajlija.

    Tools

    I was so happy when I discovered the Bracket Pair Colorizer plugin for VS Code a few days ago and installed it immediately. Makes keeping track of brackets so much easier for me. Also available for other editors, I think.

    The ARCToolkit helps you uncover issues related to the WCAG 2.1 Level A and AA guidelines.

    This & That

    The Real Dark Web is a highly recommended read that draws a connection between developers and other groups that tend to dominate the conversation on social media while the vast majority who do their daily work remain unseen.

    "We aren’t designed to live in the world we’re creating." Chappell Ellison writes about how an overwhelming mass of information is paralyzing, and how signs of limitations can help overcome this perception.

    Do you want to hear/read some German?

    Bastian was on the Working Draft podcastin July where he talked about the history of Kirby, the process of developing Kirby 3 and the most important Kirby 3 features.

    Tom Arnold has written a short piece about the joy of creating a website with Kirby.