Episode 55
Welcome to issue 55 of our Kosmos newsletter. We are a bit late this month, but we have sort of an excuse ;) Because last night was "big night"–at least for us–because it was launch night 🚀!
After a lot of hard work and several design rounds, it's finally done: We relaunched our website yesterday and hope you will like it.
The new website isn't just about a few design changes. The main idea was to tell a better story about what Kirby really is and can do for you as designers, developers, content creators or users.
But we also improved the guide and reference, made the search much easier to use with options to filter by the area on the site, added missing content and a lot more. But see for yourselves.
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.
Herbert is the Graphic Design Division of the Visual Communications Department at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar.
Plugins & Kits
A couple of Kosmos issues ago, we mentioned the Ray app from Spatie as a way to debug your applications. Now there is a helper toolfor Kirby that enables Ray on all extendable methods.
Fetch instagram photos without the need for app aproval. The Instagram plugin will download the photos and/or video thumbnails to local storage. All media will be stored in a json file.
The Kirby Cloudfront Invalidations plugin automatically invalidates slugs in AWS CloudFront.
A new kid on the blocks: True to its name, the Accordion Block provides a semantic HTML accordion block for Kirby's blocks field.
Always test third-party plugins thoroughly before using them in production. Note that we do not test plugins we list here.
Cookbook recipe
Our latest addition to the cookbook shows you how to create virtual pages from images in a parent page. Show files with their metadata as if they were pages.
Frontend
Hidde de Vries warns about blindly trusting accessibility claims of third party components and provides some questions to ask with each third party component you consider for your project.
Cassie Evans explains how to create swipey image grids.
Ideally, a website visitor would never hit a 404 page. But when they do, you need to pass them a virtual hand to recover from this failure and help them find what they were originally looking for. Eric Bailey on anti-patterns in 404 pages.
Christian Heilmann shares how to create conditional animations with CSS variables.
Sara Soueidan about styling horizontal lines with CSS.
Get your daily dose of vanilla JS tips.
CSS
Charts.cssis a CSS framework that uses CSS utility classes to style HTML elements as charts.
Version control
Only for people who (want to) feel at home in the command line: Lazygit is a simple terminal UI for Git commands.
Find the right Git command for what you want to do with the Git Command Explorer
Fonts
Fontshare: Free (but not open-source) fonts from Indian Type Foundry (ITF) for private and commercial use. Available for download or via CDN.
Tools
For Laravel Valet users: PHP Monitor is a Mac menu bar app that interacts with Laravel Valet. Helps you manage multiple PHP installations, locate config files and more.
Colord is a tiny JavaScript tool for high-performance color manipulations and conversions.
Focalboard is an open source, self-hosted alternative to Trello, Notion, Asana and the like.
Penpot is a web-based Open Source design and prototyping platform for cross-domain teams.
Editoria11y helps content editors find and fix accessibility issues.
CodeTour is a VS Code extension, which lets you to record and playback guided walkthroughs of your codebases. It can make it easier to onboard people to a new project or understand the context of a code review/PR change.
Smashing Magazine has published an extensive overview about templates and tools for designing HTML emails.
This & That
As useful as some technologies might be when it comes to identifying criminals or terrorists, surveillance techniques of the FBI, from license plate readers to facial recognition, always also pose a threat to the privacy of everyone.