Kirby is a file-based CMS
getkirby.com
getkirby.com
Its something between static site generator and full blown database cms. Its easy to debug and you can deploy just with git.
There are other similar cmses Grav, Pico, Statamic. Kirby is the most mature and just works best.
I just spend around 20 minutes on each kirby documentation pages and on grav docs.
So after 20 minutes with kirby doc I have figured out how to reach my goal with kirby even if there are some downsides and that i'll have to remind my old php courses to customize.
but after 20 minutes on grav i'm still trying to figure out if it's gonna be as simple as I need or if I'll have to understand if a twig templating of my markdown, already accelerated with parsedown and doctrine in a pimple dependency injection container will help me manage my YAML simple configuration along with the Symfony console...
YES this is all from learn.getgrav.com > BASIC > What is Grav? - the first goddam chapter of the documentation !
So the landing text of the doc is basically throwing at me that i'll have to ingest a bazillion new front-end trendy concepts while actually I just want a Markdown based site...
Maybe grav is great but i'll probably never know because documentation killed all curiosity in me.
In Grav admin you have problems when you start to have more than 30 pages. Because of its design it shows pages as flat structure. In kirby its more like folders. In grav you cant say this type of page can have only these type of children. Basicaly you have to remember which page type belongs to this page.
Kirby comunoty plugins are awesome kirby-modular for exp.
Kirby also has permissions in admin, so you can limit users what they can do.
Its also way easier i think while achieving more. There is clear path of how things work and Grav is somehow overengineered idk why i would my simple cms to compile stylus or js... it uses twig which is fine but i found it to be wrong choice because in cmses like this you are traversing trough the pages (pages are your db). Twig is not meant to do that its for showing already queried stuff from db. So they are basicaly recreating more and more php in twig so you can actualy get the data.
I am just having a loot around see what there is.
There is also core plugin called kirby modules which turns kirby into very sophisticated "site builder" we use it to make highly modular websites while keeping it simple for clients to administer.
So you make field for everything. Dates, checkboxes image selectors..
Only time they would have to touch markdown is when they would need to format text - article for example. This can be solved by using wysiwyg field instead of md field.
I do not see how it could win me away from either QOR (Go), Grav (PHP, but MIT licensed) or DatoCMS (SaaS but ties in with Hugo).
If you need clients to manage the site than Gravs admin interface is horrible especialy if you have more pages - there are dropdowns everywhere so good luck if you have 500 pages. Also grav allow restroctions in admin so for example if you have /blog which contains blogposts you cannot say that /blog can only have pages of type blogpost - it shows every single type.
Issues about this on github are ignored by Grav core devs on purpose. The reason for this is that they are company with bussiness plan and they are preparing their commercial "Admin pro" while they leave the basic interface just crippled.
I would like open source too but fees are low and the devs are extremely open.
Also kirby has much cleaner api, its much older and mature and the support is amazing. There are dedicated support people on their forums and you get response very quickly.
From where you are coming from - i dont think its thing for you. Its aimed at noobs and rapid dev of presentational sites.
It's insanely awesome and open source. No database needed either. Can also run more like a static site generator, without admin interface.
Is running it with an admin interface an option? I'm looking for a good CMS I can deploy for others (less tech-inclined) where they could still make their own small changes.
Yes both have admins and as i wrote in coments around i think admin is what makes kirby highly superior.
We always have problems with clients not being able to edit things in wordpress.
In kirby its possible to do in much simpler way. Basicaly you create admin that has only the content. No settings and user managment and all kind of useless functionality..
Grav is fine too but users will have to learn a bit more. Its more clunky and not so dumbproof.
This is true for both Grav and Kirby
Haven't had a look at how easy it is to create themes however.
Using Kirby was an enjoyable experience. Easy to setup, good docs. Easy to work with on the road. A copy of the blog on the phone and on a thumb drive.
I can't offer a comparison with other file-based cms. Didn't look around. Though I don't doubt there are other very capable offerings out there. Tried Kirby, found it to be a low fuss solution that met my needs and didn't mind paying the few quid to continue using it.
Does this exist?
The irony here is that the reason WordPress eclipsed Movable Type was that people got tired of having to go through the edit-output static files-publish cycle to modify their content. They wanted to make their changes in an editor and have them appear immediately on the live site, without waiting for a new set of static files to grind out. WP, which generates all pages dynamically, met that demand nicely.
Then of course people eventually discovered the downside of generating every page dynamically, namely that it's much more resource intensive, and started to clamor for something more efficient. So the current wave of static site generators were born, doing the exact same thing MT got killed in the marketplace for doing.
Sigh.
That said, MT has a big issue: for something that has been killed in the marketplace, it's quite expensive. I'd love to use it for the non-profit I help out, but at a $1000, it's about $950 more than what they can aford.
A cms for static https://gohugo.io and http://jekyllrb.com/ sites.
• Commits to git repo
• Deploys to S3 (and other hosts)
• Preview your work
• Login to mysite.com/admin (via a React app that communicates with our API)
Lots of cool stuff coming soon. Feedback always welcome.
admin interface can have many types of "fields" - wysiwyg is one of them (its not core but its popular)
html output - there is plugin that builds up html from whole site.
you could hook into the build and push whereever you want.
so with little setup it can be done with kirby. but same thing would be true for things like wordpress. iam sure there is wp plugin to export to html.
you could also simply use wget -m i had lot of luck with that
he wanted wysiwyg, jekyl is just static site generator. one of many btw... and nowdays better pick is probably hugo.
Last time I tried setting up caching with a wp plugin it ended up bringing the whole site down...
We use it for many websites, its something hackernews people will not like but its fastest way to make small-medium size websites i know of.
Edit, to answer (from the docs):
There's no validity check of your code or any other communication between your Kirby installation and the Kirby server. You get a clean installation without any hacks or tricks. Entering the license code is for your own records, so you can track which installation uses which license.
I'm focusing on making Kirby better instead of fighting software pirates. I trust in you to support me with a legally purchased license if you like Kirby.
administrate is easy, you can actualy easily build the admin interface so nobody can mess it up (compared to worpress that everybody breaks)
to make website - you have to do some coding
Great APIs and a really good documentation.
With a little bit of coding it went really fast and well.
$17/USD for a single website license. Very reasonably priced.
Really looks like its some decent software. My only concern is its longevity as it is not open-source.
Its hard to compete with Codeignitor or Drupal.
Bastian Allgeier the founder and main developer is very open about everything.
I wouldnt worry about stability here because those guys make their living there and iam sure they dont want stop. If they did im sure Bastian wouldnt just leave it and would figure out some future (open source it).
"NoSQL? Kirby Prefers NoDB!
Kirby is file-based – No database involved. This means first class performance,
version controllable content, simple backups and many other awesome sideeffects."
Seams to me, that the claims are just made without any explanations or prove. Sad.
Edit:
The claims are nice, but many of those are rather thin. For example, content in a database is also version controllable. I see no substantial advantage here in content on the file system.
Therefore, of course it's high-performing -- it doesn't do anything (much).
We are creating a CSV of thousands of food and allergy-related items, and want to automate the creation an independent post for each item. We can use another type of input instead of a CSV, as long as we can do it in bulk.
We want to have these pages to be SEO optimized for easy discovery on Google.
We could use wordpress with a mass importer, but it has a lot of bulk. These file-based CMSs look interesting.
Popular static website generators like Jekyll can generate pages from YAML files. Jekyll even supports CSV directly.
The storage medium isn't really what you should be choosing your CMS on, I think. And depending on your required features and expected traffic volumes, I'm not sure there's much need to choose something else.
Sure, other CMS will serve pages faster and handle more visitors better natively... but WP can get you cheap devs fast, rather than casting around for niche workers.
Beware that you get what you pay for. If you need a high-traffic capable product with lots of modern web stack in (like React and some WebSocket thingies) and you plan to choose a fresh stack then going with WP might just be total productivity killer on the project.
WP is not a place to build your custom stuff on top of. I worked on several projects where we used WP headless, as an admin interface (since web master teams love it), but relinquish all the template rendering to an app framework (Rails in our case). We open sourced the infrastructure of it[1].
Not that Rails is so fast, but we knew it well and caching/ integrations with APIs/ ElasticSearch are all quite straight forward in Rails.
Has been considered.
But there where many integrations that were required, and they are simply too simple in Ruby land. Also we needed to take traffic --yet serve dynamic pages-- and support user logins. The solution I mention does use WP-API, but on top of that it also allows "previews" and the "admin bar" (would be quite interesting to implement those with React).
edit: That we had a lot of Rails expertise in house did help, as mentioned. We also do plenty React, but a lot of the integrations needed to be server-side and many were batch-processes.
you can even run some of them against a git repo, so when someone checks in a csv change, it triggers a rebuild and republish
Take a look at the Starter Kit (it's the best way to try Kirby): https://github.com/getkirby/starterkit
Look inside the /content and /site/templates folders.
So this logic can go on a template or snippet:
<?php $latest = page('blog')->children()->visible()->limit(6); ?>
<div class="widget">
<?php foreach($latest as $post) : ?>
<a href="<?= $post->url()?>"><h2><?= $post->title()->html() ?></h2></a>
<?php endforeach ?>
</div>
It's an awesome, highly extendable, very clean CMS to work with as a developer. Based on Laravel, it's also open source: https://github.com/octobercms/october
It gives you all the power of Laravel with some very nice features built in that make developing for it a breeze. Runtime extendable classes, event listeners, Twig templating, and an AJAX framework for interacting with the PHP side of your code are just a few of the features that it includes by default; not to mention the rapid development experience empowered by the Form & Lists widgets.
Disclaimer, I'm a maintainer on the project :)
I'm looking forwards to the frontend editing component that's coming to October soon, it should make client interaction with the site much nicer.
(I'm not affiliated with the Kirby team).
If you want something for free there probably are other alternatives.
Sorry, but this idea of 'what costs money isn't a viable option' just puts me off more and more.
Esp. if the price level for something great is that reasonable.
You're under no obligation to choose a license. It's your right not to include one with your code or project, but please be aware of the implications. Generally speaking, the absence of a license means that the default copyright laws apply. This means that you retain all rights to your source code and that nobody else may reproduce, distribute, or create derivative works from your work. This might not be what you intend.
Even if this is what you intend, if you publish your source code in a public repository on GitHub, you have accepted the Terms of Service which do allow other GitHub users some rights. Specifically, you allow others to view and fork your repository.
https://help.github.com/articles/licensing-a-repository/
And the TOS say:
We claim no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to the Service. Your profile and materials uploaded remain yours. However, by setting your pages to be viewed publicly, you agree to allow others to view your Content. By setting your repositories to be viewed publicly, you agree to allow others to view and fork your repositories.
So the source is there....then surely it must be open source?
Also the devs are very nice and you can test it as much as you want.