Kirby Kosmos Episode 41

Another year is coming to a close, and it has been a really exciting one for Kirby. It started with the release of Kirby 3 in January, and ever since then, the stream of new features and improvements hasn't ceased. With 16 releases, we were able to stick to our planned regular update scheme. And with the release of the Editor, Kirby has gone the next step and turned into a great option also for editors who aren't at good terms with Markdown.

The end of the year is always a great opportunity to think about the things to be thankful for, and to say thank you. Personally, I'm really thankful for being a part of the Kirby team. For working within a very special community of so many friendly, interesting and engaged people on the forum and in our Slack channels.

And we want to say thank you to all the developers who create great plugins and contribute their part to making Kirby successful. To all you people out there who share their ideas and feedback to bring Kirby forward. And to all users who buy our licenses and create their awesome Kirby projects with so much attention to detail.

Enjoy the holidays.

Kirby in the wild I

Art Fair Dijon

Kirby plugins

Let your editors build forms via the Panel, and process and render them with ease with the FormBuilder plugin developed by team Cre8iv Click.

Bart Vandeputte's Kirby Bettersearch plugin searches for full word combinations rather than just individual words.

Using subpages as page builder modules alongside regular subpages is made easier with the Modules plugin by Thomas Günther.

Connect to Kirby's Panel through an external CAS (Central Authentication System) with the Kirby CAS plugin.

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

Kirby tip of the month

Placeholders are a great way to include repeatedly used text snippets like company names, email addresses or phone numbers, but also dynamic stuff like galleries into your text fields, and easily update them when needed.

Text:

{{ company }} was founded in 2005 with the intention of making a lot of money quickly. Today, {{ company}} rules the world. Contact us at {{ phone }}.

In your templates, you can replace such placeholders with:

<?= Str::template($page->text()->kt(), [
    'company' => 'Great Company',
    'phone' => '+01 123 1234567'
)) ?>

Wrap this in a plugin and define your replacements via the Panel or in your config.php, and you have a powerful way to keep information consistent and maintainable. Recipe will follow soon.

Note: The promised recipe is now available: The power of placeholders

Kirby Cookbook

Menus

There are many ways to build menus in Kirby just using code. But often, editors have a need to create custom menus via the Panel. Our Menu Builder recipeshows you several ways to achieve this.

Panel views

Custom views can greatly enhance the Panel, for example if you want to include dashboards with data from an API. Learn the basics of creating such a view yourself with our "My first Panel view" recipe.

Custom sections

While Kirby comes with users, files and pages sections on board, custom sections are great for adding additional functionality to Panel forms. Make your first steps towards creating your own with a little help from our link list section example.

Kirby in the wild II

HART Magazine

Behind the scenes

Kirbysites is a project by Thomas Günther that collects Kirby powered websites and lets us peek behind the scenes at how their backend is implemented. If you want to share your Panel designs, you can submit them right on the site.

Kirby Workshop

The next Kirby Workshop with Bastian will take place on January 20th, 2020 as a side event of the amazing New Adventures Conference in Nottingham. There are still tickets left: newadventuresconf.com/2020/workshops/kirby

Performance

As its title gives away, Essential Image Optimization is a comprehensive e-book about the why and how of image optimizations and best practices.

In The ugly truth about optimising beautiful images, Michael Gooding explains why and when smaller images alone do not improve the overall performance of a site.

We must do everything in our power to reduce the weight of our pages, so avoid requests for things that don’t add value. For starters, if you’re writing an article about a data breach, resist the urge to include that ridiculous stock photo of some random dude in a hoodie typing typing on a computer in a very dark room. Aaron Gustafson, Request with Intent: Caching Strategies in the Age of PWAs

CSS

Transcending CSS Revisitedis a book by Andy Clark that aims to provide a visual approach to creating code, while creating artistic, usable and accessible sites. You can buy the e-book or read it for free online.

Michael Scharnagl explores how to implement hamburger menus accessibly, if there are no better alternatives to this design pattern.

PHP

PHP 7.4 was released last week, while PHP 7.1 has reached end of life. Kirby will drop support for PHP 7.1 with version 3.4, planned for January. PHP 7.4 is not yet supported by Kirby, support will be added in an upcoming release. It is therefore strongly recommended to use PHP 7.2 or 7.3 in the meantime.

For many of us as users, ads suck big time. However, for developers or website owners, there is often no way around them. Christian Schäfer explains the problems ads cause and what we can do to at least minimize them.

In her tutorial, Cassie Evens shows how to animate SVGs along a path in a way that looks natural.

This shrinking feeling: Jeffrey Zeldman's comment on this year's Blue Beany Day.

Tournant UI is a new project that aims at creating and collecting accessible Vue components.

Episode 40

Episode 42

Episode 41