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Comment by fideloper | Hacker News Reader

Oh, it's PHP - neat. Personally I think Statamic is the entry to beat for flat-file CMSes in the PHP space. This project is the Symfony flavor I suppose (vs Statamic being based on Laravel).

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Personally think https://getkirby.com is the entry to beat but I guess it’s just because I’m used to it and it works incredibly well for my use case.

The active community for kirby is bigger than grav's as the following shows:

https://devboard.gitsense.com/getkirby/kirby

https://devboard.gitsense.com/getgrav/grav

Historically speaking, grav is more popular as it had over 2000 contributors, compared to kirby which is about 500.

Full Disclosure: This is my tool

Kirby has a very loyal customer base w/ lots of people that exclusively work with Kirby in their day job (like I am) - there's a new update? People report the first bugs in minutes. Huge benefit of Kirby imho (and also a reason why I prefer it over Statamic, Statamic people are often like "oh you have a question? yeah go look into github issues from over three years ago, i'm not here to help" tbh)

It’s two different projects run in two different ways. I don’t think that looking at git is useful or insightful in this case.

It is not just git though. It's looking at no code participation as well.

Yes but the two projects are run differently. Most of discussions around Kirby happen on the official discord server or on the official forum.

So looking at git activity is not really all that useful.

Yes you are right about not having the complete picture, as far as no code activity goes.

But even from a code perspective I'm not sure comparing repos is always all that useful. I'm not sure about Grav but on the Kirby side, if I'm not mistaken, the current official repo started with the v3 and the two previous versions were archived. So you're only comparing the code activity from ~2019 onwards but Kirby has been around for more than 10 years at this point.

Thanks for the additional info. If we are were to just look at the repo stats, Kirby is a lot more active than Grav right now. Do you happen to know what the archived repos were and if they are public? If you look at https://devboard.gitsense.com/getkirby you can see the insights for all the kirby org repos

I do want to make it clear that Kirby is a very healthy project, if anybody is misinterpreting the data.

They are not available as far as I can tell. If memory serves me well, the current kirby repo had a different name during v3 development and the code for v2 was living in another repo also named kirby. When v3 went live they renamed the two so that v3 became the kirby repo currently online and the old one became kirby-v2 or something like that. And that repo has now being archived apparently.

I've had the pleasure to build a small website with Kirby and it was such a joy to use as a developer. The only problem I faced was with my client as he was used to Wordpress and making the transition to Kirby was a bit rough for him.

Can you unpack this a bit? What was rough? How much of that was the client not being able to change?

I'm lightly looking into alternatives to WordPress. Obviously CraftCMS come up, but being a paid product - nothing work with that per se - does limit its appeal for some projects / client. So maybe there's a place for Kirby?

Keep in mind that Kirby is also a paid product

Oh? Thx. I missed that.

came here to say this. i went all over looking for a replacement... just pay for it. its exactly what you want. i built https://2020isasong.com/ on kirby and tries to rebuild with grav and ended up deciding kirby was just too good.

Agree and there’s something nice in using a paid product with a simple and straightforward license, no silly subscriptions and from a team that genuinely cares about the product.

Plus the product itself is incredibly good and it’s getting better and better over time.

Another vote for Kirby and I’ve tried them all.

Statamic is great for simple sites but for larger or multilingual sites it has lots of problems. I have a 5000+ page website that the static site generator takes 3 hours to build and there's been no improvement since v3 launched. You can use their "Static Caching" as an alternative to static generating but for my project requirements I need a purely static site. I'm busy doing a huge rewrite and switching to using Statamic in headless mode with NextJS in the front... which takes just a couple of minutes to generate the static sites instead.

I'm also still waiting for RTL support for languages in the CMS and multi-site permissions which has probably been on the roadmap for over a year but keeps getting delayed. I've submitted many ideas and bug reports on how to improve the multilingual experience but I don't think it's a priority for the team.

A very big German newspaper (https://www.spiegel.de/) runs on Statamic and they probably have an order of magnitude more pages. But not sure what kind of improvements/custom implementations they've done.

This Statamic blog post has (at least some) insights: https://statamic.com/blog/statamic-at-spiegel-scale-2

> So how does SPIEGEL do it?

> Curious about how SPIEGEL’s stack works? Here’s their high level approach, keeping in mind this is running on v2. Upgrading to v3 streamlines even more of their stack.

> A huge flat file content store organized with each entry inside its own subdirectory (you can’t have more than 10k files inside a single directory, an operating system limitation)

> The content store is using a cloud storage solution.

> Statamic’s control panel pushes entries into the content store, and then into an ElasticSearch instance via message queue.

> ElasticSearch runs as a content API with blazing fast response times and is consumed by the control panel and front-end

> The front-end is built in Go.

> User accounts are connected with an Office 365 Active Directory integration with OAuth.

Serious: you should run a profiler on the generation step (or like... for a minute of it and the CTRL-C out). Often times degenerate cases like this exist but are more or less invisible to maintainers, and just saying "the generator takes forever" is not nearly as actionable as "here's the first 60 seconds of the generation process, does anything look weird?"

I've incidently just completed a headless statamic project that used Astro for the frontend. I'd recommend you check out Astro if you haven't already as dev experiece was great and generally feels a better fit for this usecase over next.

Is or isn't Asana still mostly powered by Statamic?

Wait, isn't laravel based on/using a bunch of libraries from symfony? Or did it just use to be that way and it has changed?

Laravel the framework does use a bunch of Symfony libraries under the hood, but is still a very different framework. Symfony’s library offerings end up everywhere, with good reason. They’re used in but not strongly tied to the Symfony framework.

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