Episode 66
It is tremendously motivating that so many of you have chosen to renew your Kosmos subscription when we had to start over with a fresh list after our move to our new company! Thank you!
In return, this issue is packed to the brim with a lot of new Kirby stuff: from our spring sale to a new plugin directory, from a new release, new plugins and recipes to–of course–news from all over our industry.
Spring sale
Save 20% off of the regular price for every Kirby license including volume packages. Offer valid until Monday, April 11th, 2022.
New plugin directory
We gave the old plugin directory on our website a complete overhaul. It is now much more visual and will hopefully make it a lot easier for you to find the right plugin for your needs.
We will work on improving it even more in the next weeks and months, e.g. add compatibility data and much more. Stay tuned. And as always, don't hesitate to send us your feedback.
If you are a plugin developer, take this opportunity to review your plugin descriptions and your documentation to make it easier for users to find the right plugin, and to make your plugin easier to use.
Kirby 3.6.4
With the company stuff now out of the way, we have a lot more time again to concentrate on our true business: Kirby's development. We will try to stick to a bi-weekly release cycle again, even if that means there won't be as many new features in each release. On the plus side, and that's more important, it will result in more regular bug fixes and enhancements that reach you faster.
Kirby 3.6.4 is available from today. Check out the changelog for what's new.
New theme directory
Kirby themes/templates finally have the home that they deserve: right on our website. For theme developers, this is your new place to showcase your beautiful themes. And for users, it will be much easier to browse and find what they like.
Kirby in the wild
Kirby plugins
Kirby Plates brings Plates, a native PHP templating engine, to Kirby. Plates comes with modern template-language functionality, but without the hassle of learning a new syntax.
If you are a fan of WYSIWYG editors, you will be happy about this new kid on the block that complements our core textarea and blocks fields: the Kirby TinyMCE editor plugin.
Kirby tools & kits
Comma To Colon is a Python script that converts a CSV export from another CMS to Kirby content folders.
Kirby Rollup is starter template for Kirby, which uses Rollup as a bundler for JavaScript files.
Cookbook
Isaac Bordons contributed a recipe about branding the Panel.
There are already a lot of ways to customize Kirby, but if you want to go one step further, you can override Kirby's core classes to bend Kirby even more to your use cases. Our new recipe shows you how.
You have an interesting topic you want to write about? Don't hesitate to get in touch to discuss it. There's a free Kirby license waiting for you for every published recipe!
Frontend
Mdash is a small, framework-agnostic library of components that are comprised of standard HTML, custom HTML, and Custom Elements.
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is one of the Core Web Vitals. Harry Robert explains how to optimize the LCP candidate and some dos and don'ts along the way.
Open Props is sort of a CSS library built on CSS custom properties you can use as a starting point for your styles. It comes with a JIT compiler that makes sure you only deliver the props you use.
Tools & libraries
Dagger, a devkit for CI/CD pipelines, promises devops engineers to build powerful CI/CD pipelines that run anywhere without CI lock-in.
Coolify is a brand-new open-source and self-hostable alternative to Heroku/Netlify. It supports many applications, and a test instance is set up within seconds.
The Visit CLI tool can display the response of any URL. Think of it as curl for humans. The response code and response time will be displayed after the response.
Easily automate taking screenshots of a set of URLs with the shot-scraper template. You can also use it on the command-line.
This & that
TUS is an open protocol for resumable file uploads. It aims to solve the problem of unreliable file uploads "once and for all" (as they claim), and to replace the different solutions in the wild with a unified approach.
8 easy steps to set up multiple git accounts comes with a cheat-sheet how to manage several git accounts in a way that makes sure you don't ever push with a wrong profile again.
The people from Spatie are preparing a new course on writing clean PHP code. You can sign up to their newsletter to get some free coding tips in your inbox for the next 5 weeks (mailing stops automatically after that period).
An interesting, if somewhat not very surprising result: In a study of
French media sites, it was found that 70% of carbon-emissions on these
sites come from ads and stats.