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    Episode 49

    02 Oct 2020

    A lot of new and exciting stuff is happening in the Kirbyverse…

    Kirby 3.4.4 is (almost) here

    Kirby 3.4.4 was published on October 6, 2020.

    New Kirby community on Discord

    Get the conversation going on Discord. Engage with fellow Kirbyists. Have fun and join the Kirby CMS Discord Server!

    Feedback tool

    Our new feedback tool is the home for all your feature wishes and feedback. Come and post your ideas, comment other people's suggestions, and upvote the features you like to see most in Kirby. It will help us focus our resources on the important things.

    Video tutorials

    Become a Kirby Pro quickly with Bastian's video tutorials. 10 videos have already been published in the last couple of weeks and more are to come on a more or less weekly basis. We started with the basics but will soon cover more advanced topics.

    Kirby in the wild

    Websites created with Kirby out in the wild are always a great source of inspiration and show that with its flexibility and extensibility there are hardly any limits to what you can create with Kirby.

    HaeMa

    Kirby plugins

    The Blurry Placeholder plugin implements progressive image loading to provide a better user experience. Tiny thumbnails of the original image are combined with a blurry effect for a better placeholder experience without sacrificing payload.

    Easily add a user-friendly cookie consent modal to your Kirby website with the Cookie Banner plugin. It allows selecting right in the modal which types of cookies the user wants to accept and doesn't come with dark patterns that lure users into clicking the wrong button.

    If VS Code is your favorite code editor, you will be pleased to read that Kirby snippets for VS Code were recently updated.

    Always test third-party plugins thoroughly before using them in production. Note that we do not test plugins we list here.

    Kirby Cookbook

    Uwe Gehring shares how you can fetch all your translation strings from the t() helper that are scattered around your templates, snippets etc. and output them into a file to be translated, all with a one-liner on the command line. Looks intimidating to the uninitiated like me, but is super useful ;).

    Learn how to test your contact forms and send email locally with MailHog and our new recipe.

    Kirby articles

    Brian Liddell has written an in-depth step-by-step article about installing Kirby, Valet and Tailwind CSS all from the command line on a Mac.

    Tools

    Planka is a free, open-source, self-hostable alternative to Trello. I've installed the Docker image on my system for testing and think it looks really promising. Note that Planka is not released yet, so use with caution.

    Baserow, on the other hand, is an open-source online database tool and Airtable alternative. Baserow is also available as a Docker image so you can easily give it a shot without installing anything on a server.

    CLI & Bash scripting

    While I thought that I'm more or less comfortable with the CLI at least for common day to day stuff, I realized after switching from Mac to Linux recently that I need to get better and faster. So here are some resources I found that you might also find useful:

    SSH

    With SSH you can connect to another server in your local network or to a remote server, and control it in the same way as your own from the CLI. Everything you need to know explained in how to use SSH.

    Performance

    What is a CDN, how does it help boost performance and what types of CDN to choose for which purpose?

    While currently only supported in Chrome by default (and enablable in Firefox), the open-source AVIF image format promises much higher compression and thus smaller file sizes and better performance than WebP or JPG images.

    Security

    It is so easy: you want to know what's wrong with your JSON, google around a bit and then find this cool online tool that quickly helps you find your errors. Jamie Tanna warns why using online tools is often not such a great idea.

    Usability

    Accordions are a popular UI element for structuring lengthy content on websites. But which icons for opening and closing items work best?

    Watch Ethan Marcotte's video tutorial to learn how to design beautiful and accessible link focus states .

    This & That

    Ahmad Shadeed shows how to find the root cause of a CSS bug.

    Mono is a set of open source SVG icons, that you can download, load from CDN or duplicate on Figma.

    Rachel Andrew shares how to use CSS masking.

    We’re a small dot in evolution but we can change where we are on the line.