Episode 68
Kirby 3.7-Rc.1 is here!
Our next major version, Kirby 3.7, is well under way and here comes the first release candidate with a looooot of cool new features.
Here are some of them:
- New stats section for beautiful statistics about your site or shop
- Table layout for sections
- New Multi-toggle field
- New field previews in tables for many fields
- New search option for pages and files sections
- More health checks for the Panel
- Refined UI design: a subtle fresh new paint for the Panel
- and a lot more…
It will help us tremendously on our path to the final version, if you throw it at your projects and report any bugs or problems you can find. Thank you!
In the last issue, I wrote down my thoughts about the climate crisis and sustainable web development, and what we can do to not feel paralyzed. Whether by coincidence or because our minds were circling around the same subject, it turned out to be something like an introduction to Bastian'stalk at bt Hamburg. Bastian spoke about the urgent need for positive future visions, and how we at Kirby try to find our role in this. Watch it on YouTube.
Kirby in the wild
A project supported by Kirby. We care about a better society and the future of our planet. We support students, educational projects, social and environmental organizations, charities, and non-profits with free licenses.
Kirby plugins
Kirby KQL 1.1.0-rc.1 is out with new features including an option to run without authentication.
Use the EXIF & Resize plugin to resize your originals on upload and strip their EXIF data to your file's metadata.
The Collect plugin adds support for Laravel collections to Kirby. Useful if you have to manipulate lots of array data and want to write clean code.
The Grid plugin provides a field that lets you select grid sizes. It comes with column count configuration and prefix and suffix support for use with different CSS frameworks.
With the Language Sync plugin you can overwrite selected page fields with values from another language.
The Translations plugin enhances translation handling of content pages for Kirby. By default, it replaces the original language switch with an enhanced one, but you can also use it as a section.
Run migrations when deploying your Kirby site with the Migrations plugin. Use cases might be database migrations for your SQL database, migrating content or creating pages when deploying your Kirby page.
Cookbook & docs
Kirby provides several ways to run in "headless" mode, from using the REST API to simple routes. Our new Beyond Kirby guide introduces these approaches and gives recommendation for their use.
James Steel gets you started with Going headless, an introduction to using Kirby's REST API in conjunction with the KQL plugin.
On most websites, images account for the majority of the overall weight of the page and therefore have a heavy impact on performance. Our new cookbook recipe shows you how to implement responsive images in Kirby and boost your websites' performance.
From the Kirbyverse
Gilles Vauvarin has been a Kirby user for a long time. With his series of introductory articles to Kirby, he aims to introduce Kirby to the French speakers among you.
The AppKit implements custom Kirby and Site classes into a ready-to-use Starterkit.
Tools
Indigo: Native Mac app (currently still in Beta) to configure and run local dev environments on your Mac.
gron transforms JSON into discrete assignments. It eases the exploration of APIs that return large blobs of JSON but have terrible documentation.
Markdoc is a Markdown-based syntax and tool chain for creating custom documentation sites.
Tweetic.io provides an API to convert tweets to static HTML, which allows you to style them the way you like, and you don't have to worry about privacy issues.
Min-Max-Value Interpolation: A tool that calculates the CSS clamp formula to interpolate between two values in a given viewport range.
Array Builder is a simple, free tool to visualize the returned values of array transformations & computations made from map/filter/reduce.
Are you just as annoyed by cookie-pop-ups as me? This article lists some browser add-ons which help you browse in peace again.
PHP
Kint is a debugging helper for PHP developers, think of it as an advanced version of var_dump, but a lot more powerful and ideal if xDebug is not your thing. Easy to include into your Kirby projects with a simple wrapper plugin.
Build your regex patterns with PHP and Regex Builder.
A11y
I must admit, there was a time quite a while ago when I had a liking for gray text, but there are good reasons to stop using it.
Pixels vs em/rem explained with accessibility considerations.
This & that
Webhook.site lets you inspect, test and automate any incoming HTTP requests or e-mail. Great if you are developing locally and need an easy way to examine incoming webhooks.
Have you ever noticed that even if you don't include a <link rel="shortcut icon" /> tag into your head element, most browsers try to load a favicon nevertheless, resulting in a 404 Not Found response? If you find that annoying, here's how to disable your favicon.
Ethical design resources: A collection of articles, tools, books, frameworks etc. around ethical design.
Commands.dev is a curated, searchable list of (hard to remember) terminal commands. The idea is to centralize searching for the right command in one place.
The End of localhost: Why developing in the cloud is the future.