Episode 39

Studio Chevalvert

Here we are again with episode 39.

With summer gone on our side of the globe, the team is working with energy on the next Kirby feature release (3.3), which is planned for around the end of October. In the meantime, we published Kirby 3.2.5 with a pretty impressive list of improvements and fixes.

Thanks a lot to Ahmet Bora who's been supporting us a lot with fixing bugs and implementing features recently.

Also, the Editor is taking shape and getting ready for release, with better image uploading, more tests, and better parsers.

Kirby plugins

Manage your translation processes right from the Panel with the Kirby Memsource plugin and the Memsource TMS.

Profile your Kirby CMS code with precision using the Kirby Stopwatch plugin.

The Kirby Spreadsheet plugin provides a (spreadsheet:) KirbyTag that reads a given spreadsheet and renders it as a table. More functionality like creating pages or virtual pages will be added in the next release.

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

Kirby tip of the month

Did you know there is a shortcut for adding fields to a blueprint by using the field type as key and true as value? Instead of simply setting it to true, you can set other options like the label, without having to specify the field type. Keep in mind that field names can only be used once per blueprint, so there is a natural limit to being lazy 😉.

fields:

  tags: true
  url: true
  text:
    label: Caption

Cookbook

We went into the kitchen and came out with a new recipe. Kirby in a nutshell is a round-up of things you may want to consider and questions to ask yourself when you start building your first (or second, or…) Kirby project.

Natucate

Kirby Workshops

Berlin, 13 November 2019 (sold out!)
Full-day workshop with Bastian at Beyond Tellerrand conference

Nottingham, 22 January 2020
Full-day workshop with Bastian at New Adventures conference

Email

Creating HTML emails is hard. Can I Email… is a counterpart to the fantastic caniuse.com website, but for email-related stuff, where you can check what features are supported by different mail clients.

PHP

Unit testing with PHPUnit is a beginner's video series introducing Test-Driven Development with PHPUnit. The videos are not 100% up-to-date with the latest version of PHPUnit, so there are some minor glitches, but you will get a solid foundation of what you can do with PHPUnit before diving into unit-testing your plugins.

CSS

Andy Bell's talk on Keeping it simple with CSS that scales as written and audio versions.

Learn how to Build a scrapbook layout with CSS grid.

Learning

Roland Dreger shares how to connect Adobe InDesign and Kirby for a cloud publishing solution.

The new Mozilla Developer channel provides videos on topics related to designing and developing for the web and Firefox' dev tools, for example Coding a dark mode for your website.

A11y & beyond

In Speeding up the web with the Save-Data header", Matt Hobbs explores how to adapt our websites to respond to this header.

Watch Marco Zehe's talk on Firefox's new accessibility features to learn how to use them to identify and improve issues on your websites.

This & that

In his article on simplicity, Bastian shares his thoughts on how today's tooling landscape–despite its advantages for testing, automation, etc.–is anything but simple or futureproof.

ASPIRE "is an acronym that neatly covers some ideal qualities that I think we should… aspire to, when aiming to create excellent websites." Check out Scott Jehl's article to find out what each character stands for.

The Data Detox Kit collects tips to regain control over your digital privacy, security and well-being.

Quote of the month

"JS is the web's CO2, and we should start asking why the biggest polluters aren't cleaning up their respective acts. Loudly. Insistently. Even when that's uncomfortable."
Alex Russell