Episode 53
On Wednesday, we released Kirby 3.5.3, which is all about fixing those little issues that keep magically popping up no matter how good your tests. But a new release wouldn't really be Kirby-like if we didn't always sneak in a few little features as well, which you can find in the change log.
Kirby chat with Bastian
Listen to Bastian chatting with Matt Guay on the SaaS Radio Hour podcast about flat-file content management systems, building a hosted version of Kirby, balancing open source and a business model, Markdown vs WYSIWYG, and more.
Kirbyzone
Kirbyzone is custom hosting for Kirby, made by people who have worked with Kirby for years. Planned features include a secure and fully managed environment, superfast SSD servers that run only what's needed, automatic deployments, license handling, GitHub integration, free SSL certificate setup, your choice of a datacenter location all around the world, personal support and so much more. Kirbyzone is still in its early stages, but if you are interested and want to know more, hop on the dedicated Discord channel.
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.
Zammad Ticketing System
Plugins
Some like it light: A light color scheme for the Panel with rounded border edges, light focus-outlines and mini-animations.
The first in a hopefully long list of custom blocks for the new blocks field: A link button block.
Always test third-party plugins thoroughly before using them in production. Note that we do not test plugins we list here.
Cookbook recipes
If you want to get a basic understanding of objects and classes in Kirby, check out our new Understanding OOP recipe.
Load more with Ajax: Long on the wishlist, the popular recipe has been brought back for Kirby 3 with a new approach and free from jQuery.
More Kirby
Moritz Stückler is currently researching ways to get Kirby working on "Object Storage providers". If you are interested, have questions or want to give feedback, get in touch. You can read more about it on GitHub.
Debugging
Last month I posted a recipe how to get Xdebug working with VS Code, but of course, there are other tools out there that can help you with getting the job done (if you invest a bit of money). Ray by Spatie is a well-designed desktop app for Mac, Windows and Linux.
Productivity
That linters help you to write better code and be more productive is nothing really new. But I really liked the idea to connect linters to a pre-commit Git hook to make sure your files are fine before you commit. At least to me, it happens all the time that I commit only to find out that GitHub Actions or the GitLab pipeline fail with some linter or the other.
Frontend
Learn to create a simple, accessibility friendly and configurable fluid type system that uses modern CSS sizing functions.
Christian Heilmann explains how to share data between CSS and JavaScript using custom properties.
Sacha Greif shares a well written list of 21 Bad Front-End Habits to Drop in 2021.
SVG Waves: A tool to easily create wave shapes.
A11y
Eric Bailey on the dos and don'ts regarding the use of the tabindex attribute.
Van11y(for Vanilla-Accessibility) is a collection of accessible scripts for rich interface elements, built using progressive enhancement and customizable.
This & That
If the Internet was a country, it would be the 7th largest polluter in the world and is expected to grow considerably by 2030.
If you want to be part of a shared commitment to create a sustainable internet, sign the manifesto.
Not buying the latest gadget is arguably the best way to reduce e-waste in the first place, but if you do replace your stuff, think about selling or giving away your used stuff.
Stripe’s extension for Visual Studio Code makes it easy to generate sample code, view API request logs, forward events to your application, and use Stripe within your editor.
Maybe I'm a little obsessed with dark patterns recently. But they keep haunting me around the web. At least Amazon is now facing legal challenges for their 6-page Prime member cancellation trickery. More about dark patterns:
- Dark Patterns
- Losing faith in UX
- We Value Your Privacy (At About $0.50) – Dark Patterns in UI Copy
Handy: If you replace github
with github1s
in a GitHub URL, you can read GitHub code with VS Code and easily navigate between files and folders.