Episode 44
Take part in our first ever Kirby survey
We just created our first ever Kirby survey. It will (hopefully) give us some great insights into the areas where we are doing well and particularly where we should improve. It only takes about 5 - 10 minutes and is totally anonymous, but you can leave your name and favorite Kirby project(s) if you are willing to come out of the dark.
Kirby Konf
Kirby Konf was cancelled on March 11 because of the Corona virus pandemic.
Only two more weeks until our first Kirby Konf will take place in Mainz. We are so excited! The 50 tickets were gone within less than 2 days after the official "call to tickets" and if you were among the unfortunate who didn't manage to get one: I'm sure this meeting won't be the last one, and we will try to share as much from the event as we can.
Because of the Corona virus, we have been in contact with the ministry of health. At this point, they don't see a reason to cancel the event, but also noted that such official statements can change at any time. We will monitor the situation in the next two weeks and keep you updated. Health always takes priority!
If you can't make it…
If you got a ticket and find that you won't be able to make it or don't want to attend anymore for whatever reason, please be so kind to let us know as soon as you can. You would most likely make someone on the waiting list very happy. Thank you!
Our partners
We are incredibly happy to have found two great partners for Kirby Konf who will help us cover the cost for the free vegan/vegetarian lunch on the day of the meeting and drinks at the warm-up on Friday night:
Uberspace
Uberspace is a very exceptional shared hosting provider we recommend whole-heartedly for their no-bullshit philosophy, their pay-what-you-want pricing scheme, green energy hosting and a lot of other reasons. The Kirby team members have been using their service for years for all sorts of projects and they also host our Kirby Demo.
KeyCDN
KeyCDN is a high performance content delivery network that has been built for the future. It only takes a few minutes to start delivering content to your users at a blazing fast speed." We also use KeyCDN on the getkirby.com website to deliver our assets. Cookbook recipe in the making.
Kirby in the wild
While flat-file by nature, Kirby also supports virtual pages from all sorts of sources (database, APIs etc.). Or use Kirby as your backend and go headless on the frontend. The possible solutions are as flexible as your ideas are infinite.
Talking Shorts is an online film magazine dedicated to short films with the goal is to make shorts more visible and to create a wider discourse about the art form.
GOOSE Gourmet is a catering service for companies and private customers located in Frankfurt (Main)/Germany.
Want to see more examples? Visit our showcase!
New Releases: 3.3.4 and 3.3.5-rc1
A bit more than two weeks ago, we released Kirby 3.3.4 with some smaller new features and enhancements, for example the new sticky option for columns in blueprints. We are now in the middle of getting ready for Kirby 3.4, but as an intermediary step we will pre-release a new minor Kirby 3.3.5-rc1 version on Tuesday which includes a lot of PRs by Ahmet Bora 🎉.
Kirby 3.3.5 was released on March 17, 2020.
Kirby tip of the month
You probably know that you can create links to easily access the Panel from the frontend with $page->panelUrl()
. This is useful if you want to add edit links for logged-in users next to each page title, for example. If you just want a quick way to access the Panel from the frontend, you can use this route:
Once you have added this to your config.php
or a plugin, you can add .panel
to each page URL in the browser bar to go and edit this page in the Panel.
Kirby plugins
With the Table field plugin editors can easily fill in flexible tables in the Panel.
Kirby Likes adds routes, handy page methods and a Panel field so you can easily add likes/hearts/votes to pages.
The UnitTestKitis a Kirby installation with examples of how to unit-test routes, models and custom classes.
The Kirby Mailjet plugin got a huge overhaul and now got support for SMS and newsletter/campaign helpers.
Kirby Yasumi is wrapper around the Yasumi library that gives you a list of official public holidays and the dates they fall on for any country and year.
Always test third-party plugins thoroughly before using them in production.Tools
Tiny helpers is a collection of all sorts of single-purpose online tools for web developers.
Faker is a powerful PHP library for generating fake data useful during development. It comes with providers for country specific data, and there are also quite a few extensions available.
OpenRefine is an open source tool for working with messy data: cleaning it; transforming it from one format into another; and extending it with web services and external data.
Performance
If your server runs on Nginx rather than Apache, learn how to optimize nginx and PHP-FPM from beginner to crazy with this talk by Arne Blankerts.
When CSS blocks, an article by Tim Kadlec about how preload patterns can hurt performance.
CSS
Visualize your stylesheets and generate documentation for a design system with CSS stats, a free open source tool.
Check out how to create a responsive Grid magazine layout with only 20 lines of CSS in this article from CSS Tricks.
JavaScript
Alpine.js is a minimal JS framework that "offers you the reactive and declarative nature of big frameworks like Vue or React at a much lower cost" as they say in their description.
Security
The story of Let's Encrypt from its early beginnings in 2012/13 to becoming the world’s largest HTTPS Certificate Authority today.
PHP
PHP 8, the next major version of PHP, will only be released by the end of 2020, but if you like a preview of what new features to expect, check out this article.
Fonts
Getting started with variable fonts: Variable Fonts is a website intended to teach you about variable fonts and their utility.
A11y
A11support is the "Can I use" resource for assistive technologies.
This & That
With Open Peeps you get a collection of free hand-drawn vector illustrations you can mix and match for your purposes.
Create GitHub issues, pull requests etc. without ever leaving the command line with the GitHub CLI (Beta).