Episode 61

With Kirby 3.6-RC1, which we are releasing today, we are finally approaching the final release of Kirby 3.6. If you have followed along over the last couple of months, you will know that this new Kirby version will be a real game changer and open the gate for many new possibilities in the future.

So what's new in the RC?

In addition to all the great features we already introduced, the RC has some nice surprises. Here is a summary of some highlights, including the changes already added in Beta 3:

• New k-error-dialog component for detailed error messages
• Default block previews can be overwritten
• Improved parsing content from Word documents to create blocks
• Option to add custom email providersPossibility to create custom block and layout methods
• Extendable blocks models

To test this new version, download the Kirby 3.6-RC1 release. For details, check out the 3.6 docs. We are looking forward to your feedback.

Kirby in the wild

Leiden Bio Science Park

Kirby Plugins

If you plan to use Fathom analytics, a privacy-friendly analytics software, on your Kirby website, check out the new Kirby Fathom Analytics plugin.

The Kirby 3 Gnupg plugin adds information about PGP public keys when you upload .asc files. The plugin does this using the gpg binary which is a requirement.

The Kirby VP Kit is a boilerplate that promises to simplify setting up virtual pages in Kirby in multiple languages.

As its name suggests, the Kirby column settings plugin provides the option to add column settings to Kirby's layout field type.

Note that we do not test plugins we list here. Therefore, always test third-party plugins thoroughly before using them in production.

Frontend

Validating forms client-side with JavaScript can greatly enhance user experience. If you want to get started, you might like to check out this form validation tutorial on Freecodecamp.

A concise comic to explain how Cross-Origin-Resource-Sharing (CORS) works. And a CORS playground by Jake Archibald.

HTML with Superpowers: Dave Rupert talks about the power of Web Components for non-JavaScript developers.

Tools

Tidy Viewer is a cross-platform .csv pretty printer that uses column styling for a cleaner presentation of data. Useful if you prefer opening csv files in the CLI rather than some application.

wallabag is an open-source self-hostable alternative to applications like Pocket, Instapaper etc. for saving web pages to read them later.

Can I include? is a little helper tool that lets you check if you can use a given HTML element inside another element.

Dive is a tool for exploring a docker image, layer contents, and discovering ways to shrink the size of your Docker/OCI image.

Performance

The

tag is the single biggest render-blocking part of your page. ct.css is a diagnostic CSS snippet that lets you uncover potential performance issues in your page’s tags.

A high Lighthouse score is usually a good indicator for a performance optimized site. However, in a real-word scenario, there might still be issues a synthetic score cannot uncover.

Kirby 3.6 will support the WebP and AVIF image formats for thumbs. If you want to learn more about these image formats, check out this article on Smashing Mag.

A11y

Understanding Logical Focus Order: How to make sure that keyboard users can navigate the elements on a page in logical order.

In an 1-hour webinar, Matt Putland discusses new success criteria to expect in WCAG 2.2.

This & That

If you set a redirect from /.well-known/change-password to the change password page of your website, you can enable password managers to navigate your users directly to that page.

Learn how to record and replay audio using the MediaStream APIwith this tutorial by Shahed Nasser.

The new Sanitizer API aims to build a robust processor for arbitrary strings to be safely inserted into a page.

User-agent preference settings take priority over OS settings when querying the user's prefers-color-scheme setting.