Episode 85

This is our first Kosmos edition in 2024, and the first month of this new year is already almost over 😱. I hope it will be a good one for you and your loved ones, and for all of us as a society to move forward, not back.

Kirby 4.1.0

Today we are publishing the first bigger Kirby 4 release. Here are the most important new features:

• You can now hide the title and slug in the dialog when creating a new page, and even set default values via the page blueprint
• The Stats section gets support for icons
• You can now populate the options in a Color field using query language or an API
• New sharpen option for our image manipulation engine (aka thumbs)

There's also a long list of enhancements, bug fixes and refactorings, for details see our changelog.

https://github.com/getkirby/kirby/releases/tag/4.1.0

Kirby lecture & meetups

Zoom Online Lecture📍
Wednesday, February 14, 2024, 19:45 PM
Vanilla Web Design: Gestalten mit Browser, Git und Kirby

Berlin, Germany 📍
Wednesday, February 21, 2024, 19:00 PM
Kirby CMS Community Meetup Berlin

Bremen, Germany 📍
Thursday, February 22, 2024, 18:00 PM
Kirby get together Bremen #1

Kirby in the wild

Kirby plugins

The new year starts with a long list of new plugins 🎉:

Kirby Copilot lets you create content in the Panel with the help of AI. You can test how it works in the playground, before you buy.

Kirby Content Translator is a Panel plugin to translate content at once with DeepL or other services.

Kirby SEO claims to be an all-in-one toolkit for implementing SEO & Meta best practices in your Kirby 4+ site.

Create server-side-rendered SPAs with Kirby and Inertia.js. Kirby Inertia configures your Kirby site to output Inertia responses and integrates the server-side-renderer for Inertia.

The Kirby Table Field plugin helps you to effortlessly create and manage tables within the panel. You can easily tailor tables to their specific needs, enhancing the efficiency and management of data presentation.

Kirby 4 SEO is another small plugin for generating meta data using shared controllers and field data. Also creates Facebook Opengraph and Twitter social sharing information.

With Kirby Tidy HTML you can tidy up your HTML templates, for example remove empty tags, set indentation, automatically order attributes, etc.

Kirby SERP Preview: Kirby plugin that shows search engine result page previews right in the Panel.

The Kirby language selector plugin provides a language selector in the Panel with translation state and dropdown for deleting translations.

Kirby Devkit: Get easily accessible info on variables and data in frontend for template development.

Partner directory

Our partner directory has grown considerably since its launch with 11 partners in May last year. Today, 42 partners are listed in our directory, 15 of them on the Plus plan. What is more, our directory turned out very diverse and includes freelancers as well as agencies with different skill sets and specializations. And although we are still very much focused on Europe, this is great news for clients looking for developers to build their websites, or other developers in search of support! Thank you to everyone who has joined us on this journey and thus helped strengthen Kirby's market position.

Kirby cosmos

Kirby 4 Tutorial, despite its title, is an opinionated Starterkit for Kirby aimed at Craft CMS users, as it tries to preserve the file structure and workflow Craft users are used to.

Jack Baty describes the process of implementing his journal of daily notes in Kirby.

Performance

Resource loading at the cutting edge aims to give you a better understanding of the many mechanisms and protocol features that help developers with optimizing resource loading in their websites.

The Three Cs: Concatenate, Compress, Cache: Why bundling is still a thing in the current landscape.

Getting started with web performance: An overview of the why and how with explanation of the most important metrics.

This & That

SVGPS converts your SVG icons into a single JSON file, which you can then use in your frontend or mobile projects.

In Never underestimate HTML, Lara Aigmüller writes about the misconceptions that frontend coding is easy, drawing attention to the challenges and skill sets needed to create maintainable user interfaces.

The target size is the specific region within a user interface element where a user clicks, touches, or taps to trigger an action. If the target size is too small, users have problems interacting with an element. Ahmad Shadeed shows how to improve target sizes.

Attribute selectors make it possible to style your website without adding additional classes, for example your external links.

And talking about external links, we can go one step further and consider accessibility aspects of our external links.

The Docker Init command (available in Docker Desktop 4.19.0+) implements some magic into Docker that takes care of creating the Docker file and other configuration files for you, speeding up the process.

Sara Soueidan explains ARIA live regions — the accessible notifications' system that enables us to make dynamic web content more accessible to screen reader users. The article has a second part to it.

Pipelight is a tiny command line tool that executes a list of tasks you provided in a configuration file.

Out of the Cyber Crisis – Deming in the World of Cybersecurity is excerpted from W. Edwards Deming's book Journey to Profound Knowledge, and applies Deming's findings to DevOps and cybersecurity.