👀 Get a glimpse of Kirby 5 Learn more
Skip to content
    Search by Algolia

    Episode 60

    22 Sep 2021

    I hope this 60th issue of Kosmos finds you well. I can't believe we are already into our 6th year with this newsletter.

    I am absolutely thrilled that we have so many cool new plugins again this month, and also two new community contributions in our Cookbook. Thanks a lot, everyone, for your enthusiasm.

    Kirby 3.6 beta is here

    We finally left the alpha phase behind! The Kirby 3.6 beta is the first step towards the final release and comes with some great additional features:

    • Extensible areas, dialogs, dropdowns, and searches
    • Lots of new icons
    • Support for non-editable blocks
    • New Str::safeTemplate() method
    • New $model->toSafeString() method
    • Custom iframe attributes for video() helper
    • More privacy friendly video block

    Find more details in the changelog. You can download the beta from https://github.com/getkirby/kirby/releases/tag/3.6.0-beta.1. We have also updated the 3.6 docs.

    Kirby in the wild

    Sunlight

    Kirby Plugins & tools

    Kirby Navigation lets you build manual hierarchical menus with drag & drop level indentation.

    Give large Kirby websites a performance boost with Kirby Boost: It caches content files of pages, and adds automatic unique IDs, fast lookup and Tiny-URLs.

    With Kirby Map you get a custom field and a custom block with everything you need to include a map into your website. The block supports multiple markers and a built-in Mapbox instance.

    Kirby Grid Block provides a custom block that allows you to nest layouts.

    Mastodon is a free, open-source Twitter alternative. Integrate your Mastodon timeline or toots into your Kirby website with Kirby Mastodon.

    Kirbyup is a zero-config bundler for Kirby Panel plugins intended to replace the now deprecated Parcel 1 we used in the past.

    Autoloader for Kirby is a helper to automatically load various Kirby extensions in a plugin.

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

    Cookbook recipes

    Sebastian Greger wrote an amazing new cookbook recipe about Batch updating content, a task that comes up every so often during development or later in the process. Complete with how to update different field types in multiple languages.

    In Kirby meets PurgeCSS, Manuel Steinberg explains how you can use PurgeCSS to get rid of unused CSS styles. This is particularly useful when using CSS frameworks like Bootstrap, TailwindCSS etc. where you only need a fraction of the provided styles.

    Tools

    htmlq does for HTML what jq does for JSON.

    Miller is a tool to manipulate name-indexed data such as CSV, TSV, and tabular JSON on the command line.

    timefind lets you find the exact moment that something was added to a website. It quickly flips through Web Archive snapshots using binary search, pinpointing the date of the modification.

    AskGit is a tool for executing (read-only) SQL queries against data in git. It allows you to ask questions about a project's history and source code.

    Privacy

    Vytal shows what traces your browser leaves behind while surfing the web. It allows you to understand how easy it is to identify and track your browser even while using private mode.

    Security

    The Allstar GitHub App can be installed on organizations or repositories to set and enforce security policies. It then continuously monitors and detects any GitHub setting or repository file contents that may be risky or do not follow security best practices.

    Frontend

    Reminder that there is more to HTML than divs: Element diversity.

    Have you ever wondered why hyperlinks are blue? Elise Blanchard dives deep into web history to find an answer.

    Ahmad Shadeed shows use cases where modern CSS features like CSS Grid or Flexbox can be used to replace absolute positioning.

    Pollen is a library of CSS variables with a quite different philosophy than your usual CSS framework.

    A11y

    Jake Archibald about Writing great alt text: Emotion matters

    This & That

    View Source allows you to view the source code of websites from any device without having to deal with developer settings. Alternatives are apps for mobile devices like View source for iOS or for Android.

    Figma is a design tool that is quite popular among web designers/developers. If you are not familiar with it and want to check it out, there is now a free course on freecodecamp.

    Smashing Magazine has published a 3-part series about HTTP3:

    The people from Tower, the Git client, have a great article on when and how to force-push in Git.

    Influence without authority: Strategies to trigger change or have an impact when you don't have the power to give orders or make decisions.