Episode 62
Kirby 3.6 launch event
Meet the team and get a live introduction into Kirby 3.6 at our launch event on Tuesday, November 23rd, 08:00 pm CET at Stay Curious Café. You will of course also have the opportunity to chat and ask your questions.
Edit: A video of the event is available on Youtube
Kirby 3.6 is here
After seven months of hard work, we are happy to announce that Kirby 3.6 is finally here. It comes with a ton of exciting new features that will make both users and developers happy. And it paves the way for more great features to come in the next releases. Especially, the Panel profits from a reduced JS bundle size and has become much more performant. Here are some highlights:
Cardlets: The missing link between cards and list layouts for pages and files sections and pages, files and users fields.
New views: The settings view has been replaced with separate system and language views. The system view provides useful information about your setup.
WebP & AVIF image formats: Convert your images to modern, performant image formats on the fly.
Lots of new icons: Use our Panel icon set to visually enhance the Panel interface for your users.
Copy & paste for blocks: You can now copy and paste blocks between block fields, and even create blocks from pasted HTML and text.
Panel CSS properties can now be used throughout the Panel and in every plugin. Now, it's even easier to style the Panel for your users in your custom Panel stylesheet.
New line block, which automatically supports and imports hr blocks from the old Editor plugin.
New slug field: perfect for creating sanitized strings for IDs, URL paths, CSS class names, etc.
More power for blocks and layouts with extensions:
- Block model
- Block & blocks methods
- Layout & layouts methods
By popular request: Configurable navigation option that lets you configure how users can move between content with the prev/next navigation buttons.
We cannot possibly list all new features here. Discover them all in our release notes and in the updated docs.
Cookbook
To accompany the new areas feature (which replaces the former views), we have written a brand-new recipe: “My first Panel area”.
Kirby in the wild
Kirby Plugins
Track page views, referrers, and devices on your Kirby 3 website with Kirby Simplestats (beta).
IndieConnector is a Kirby Webmention plugin to receive (and soon send) webmentions. It replaces the former Tratschtante plugin.
Visualize the site/logs folder in the panel with Kirby LogBook. Opinionated defaults to work best with the Kirby Log plugin.
Kirby Logger logs any content changes on your website and displays them in a Panel area.
Elephant is a highly performant PHP Cache Driver for Kirby.
Most plugins affected by breaking changes in Kirby 3.6 have already been updated to work with the new release. You can check out their current compatibility status in our list on GitHub.
Note that we do not test plugins we list here. Therefore, always test third-party plugins thoroughly before using them in production.
Kirby articles/solutions
Pikselkraft wrote an in-depth article about why they have chosen Kirby as their go-to CMS.
Bruno Meilick wrote an interesting forum post about caching in Kirby.
Frontend
UnoCSS is an atomic CSS engine you can use to create your own frontend utility-class framework. If you would like to use this engine together with Kirby, you might also like to check out Johann Schopplich's Kirby-Vite-UnoCSS kit.
Scott O'Hara on the current state of the dialog element.
Prevent image squeezing or stretching with the object-fit and background-size CSS properties.
Tutorial: Create an in-page search with JavaScript, useful if you have a lot of information on a single rendered page that you want to make searchable/filterable.
Lea Verou on strategies of using CSS Properties with defaults.
Tools
Huetone help you create and fine-tune an accessible color system.
MistQL is a miniature embeddable language for performing computations on JSON-like structures.
Neat brings GitHub notifications to your Mac's menu bar.
PHP
OnlinePHPfunctions is built for PHP developers to run some code quickly in different PHP versions.
New PHP 8.1 features in 8 code blocks and all that's new in PHP 8.1.
This & That
The HTTP working group at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is working to define new HTTP standards aimed at making debugging your caching of static content easier.