Episode 5
Here we are back again with the 5th episode of Kirby Kosmos. Let's start with a little recap.
We just released the final version of Kirby 2.4.0. Have you got round to testing the new permissions and content representation features yet?
Together with Kirby 2.4.0 we also published a brand new Starterkit, which features an awesome, completely different design, and lots of changes under the hood to help you get your projects up and running with Kirby even easier. View the live demo. You can read all about the design decisions and the development process on our blog.
Powered by Kirby
Every month, a lot of great Kirby-powered websites are published. Like every month, we selected three, each of them very unique:
Kirby Plugins
- The Kirby Mailer Wrapper plugin by LCD344 provides a class that adds a wrapper around all Kirby mail drivers and provides two new drivers, a log driver and a PHPMailer driver.
- Spad is a Kirby plugin by Jon Gacnik, which adds a new site method to Kirby that exposes your site data as JSON. These data can then be used, for example, in a single page app or any other project that can make use of JSON data .
- Jens "Plugin Machine" Tornell strikes again with two new plugins: The Keyword Density Plugin targets users who want to optimize their content for search engines, while the Panel Brand bar helps developers to identify different environments (e.g. development/production).
- Language variables usually live in their language files and cannot be edited via the Panel. The Kirby Translations plugin by Roman Steiner allows Panel users to edit these languages variables in an easy way.
Tools
- Emanuel Kluge developed an HTML to KirbyText converter that is available as both a tool you can install on your server​ as well as an online service. Try it out.
Cookbook
- August Miller contributed an extensive recipe to the Kirby cookbook: learn how to deploy Kirby with Capistrano, an open-source deployment tool. Check it out!
Javascript
- Push.js is a cross-browser solution for desktop notifications, which provides a fallback to older implementations if the browser does not support the new JavaScript Notification API.
Security
- Beginning in January 2017 with the release of Chrome 56, Google will start to mark all HTTP websites that collect passwords or credit cards as non-secure. This will come as a first step in a series of measures intended to make the web more secure by raising awareness for the lack of security of HTTP connections. Time to switch to HTTPS as soon as possible.
IoT
- Web Bluetooth is a technology that allows a website to communicate with nearby Bluetooth devices. The Web Bluetooth API is available in Chrome 53 as an Origin trial for Chrome OS, Android M, and Mac. This tutorial gets you started with using this experimental feature.
Fonts
- Google has released a new open source font family called Noto, which aims to support all writing systems both living and historical. Noto fonts come in different styles and weights. Check them out at https://www.google.com/get/noto/.
That's it for this month's episode of Kirby Kosmos. We hope you enjoyed it, and we'd absolutely love to have your feedback in the forum or on Twitter.
Cheers,
Sonja & Lukas from the Kirby team