Our poor blog must have felt pretty lonely in the last months. But instead of falling into hibernation, we have been super busy working on all kinds of exciting projects for you. Here's a little summary…
Kirby 2.3.0
After three months of development and two beta test rounds, Kirby 2.3.0 is finally here! Here are some of the highlights of the new version:
- A better thumb api
- A brand new plugin and component architecture
- A new image panel field
- Dozens of usability improvements and bug fixes
The list of changes has become quite long again. Please check out the changelog for the full list and more highlights.
You can download the latest version now or get it from Github. You can also update via our new Kirby CLI.
20% Discount on pro licenses
To celebrate the new release, pro licenses will be 20% off until May, 19th.
The Kirby team is growing!
The Kirby team is slowly but steadily growing. With the addition of Sonja and Lukas — our official forum moderators — last year, we managed to get to an entire new level in terms of support in the forum. They also do a tremendous job by converting issues and questions into better docs and gathering all your feedback and suggestions.
Nico has started helping me out with all sorts of bug fixes and features last year and together with Lukas, who happens to be a great developer and tech supporter at the same time, we managed to ship quite some code together.
Meet Fabian
Just two weeks ago, I managed to get another long-term Kirby user on board. Similar to Nico, Lukas and Sonja, I met Fabian through his work on Kirby plugins and client projects.
He brings a very convincing combination of programming and design skills into the team and I think his work speaks for itself: https://fabianmichael.de
Follow the Kirby team on Twitter
With four people who are regularly working on the project and Nico's help as a contributor, we are heading into a pretty exciting future.
Better docs
Sonja, Lukas and I started working on overhauling the Kirby docs a couple of weeks ago. As a first result you can now check out two brand new guides:
Together with many new and improved docs sections and added examples, we will continue to further extend the docs and create more such guides. We hope to make it even easier for you to find out everything you need to know about Kirby that way.
Kirby CLI
Earlier this year, we released a smart little command line interface for Kirby, which helps you with all kinds of tasks, such as installation, updates or even creating boilerplate controllers, plugins and more.
https://github.com/getkirby/cli
Kirby Patterns
Another project which launched at the beginning of this year is the Kirby patterns plugin, which converts your Kirby installation into a living style guide. If you are interested in modular frontend components and style guides, you should definitely give it a try.
https://github.com/getkirby-plugins/patterns-plugin
Kirby community projects
The Kirby community is thriving and many exciting projects pop up all over the place. Here are just a few…
The unofficial plugin list
Jens Törnell and John Coyne started an unofficial but super extensive list of Kirby plugins, fields and more. You can join them on Github and help to curate the list if you want.
https://github.com/jenstornell/kirby-plugins
Twig Template Engine for Kirby
Florens Verschelde created the first plugin for Kirby 2.3.0 using the new core components, which replaces Kirby's template engine with Twig. So if you are a Twig fan, make sure to check it out.
https://github.com/fvsch/kirby-twig
Kirby Shopkit
Sam Nabi is working on Shopkit for quite some time already and it has evolved into an amazing solution if you are looking for a shop based on Kirby.
https://github.com/samnabi/shopkit
Kirby Static Builder
Florens seems to be on fire at the moment and also released a brand new static site builder, which is far more advanced than the basic script I wrote some months ago. So if you are looking for a way to convert your Kirby installation into a static site, definitely check this out:
https://github.com/fvsch/kirby-staticbuilder
Join the community
Did you build something interesting or do you have questions or feedback? Join the forum and talk to other Kirby users and developers.
New partners
In the last months we managed to get a set of awesome partners on board, who help us to make our work on Kirby easier.
KeyCDN
KeyCDN has been our first partner. It's a really powerful and affordable CDN from Switzerland and helps us to boost performance of the Kirby website for visitors from all over the world.
Imgix
Imgix is a great image processing and hosting service. We use their service for all images on the Kirby website. We can definitely recommend imgix for all image-heavy projects.
Codetree
With many repositories on Github and more and more incoming issues and feature requests, it gets really hard to keep track of issues and milestones through the GitHub interface. Codetree solves this problem brilliantly and we are happy to have them as a partner.
Algolia
We are currently cooking something special for you and we are very excited that it has to do with Algolia. More will follow soon :)
A big Thank you to all our partners!
The road ahead
If you take a look at the forum or at our GitHub issues, you can see that there are already tons of new projects and ideas to work on. We decided to switch to a new release cycle in order to move forward in smaller but more constant steps to get new features out more efficiently. We will tell you more about it soon.
Summer is going to be super busy again and we can't wait for it!
Cheers,
Bastian
