Episode 74
Let's celebrate the end of the year with a firework of good news around Kirby and our industry: Sale, new release, new plugins and lots of interesting reads and tools.
Sale: only one more week
Our December sale started last Monday and runs until 12 December 2022. Save 20% on all licenses and volume packs.
Kirby 3.8.3 release
Kirby 3.8.3 got quite a few really nice new features and enhancements: new functionality for the query language, the option to switch to UUID v4 mode via a config setting and some new hooks, including new language hooks.
Apart from adding new features, we always use new releases to clean up and refactor our code. You won't see anything unless you look under the hood, but you will enjoy more robust, future-proof and secure code.
Kirby CLI 1.1.0
The Kirby CLI got a cool update. You can now define custom commands in Kirby plugins, register your licenses or remove all UUIDs.
Kirby in the wild
Kirby plugins & tools
Automatically convert pngs to jpgs on upload with Kirby PNGs to JPGs. Make the life of your editors easier while keeping your website fast.
Display UTM stats in nice stats sections including bar graph (also a good resource if you don't need the plugin but need a bar graph in your stats, don't you, Adam 😉).
The Kirby Form Block Suite is the successor of the Kirby Form Block plugin. It is currently in beta, but looking for testers prior to the release in January. Happy testing!
Frontend
Organizing stylesheets as a first step in an approach to write clean, maintainable CSS.
Did you know that disabling JavaScript turns off native lazy loading.
UI frameworks like Bootstrap or UI Kit are an often used solution to build a website quickly and coherently, but often add unnecessary stuff and when not used rightly, even make things worse. Here's why you don't need a UI framework.
Want to brush up on your knowledge of modern CSS? Check out Manuel Matuzovic's 100 days of more or less modern CSS.
PHP
Need to fill your theme or project with fake data but don't want to think about it? Faker to the rescue.
In The PHPer's Guide to OAuth, Mauro Chojrin dives deep into building an end-to-end OAuth implementation in PHP.
PsySH is a runtime developer console, interactive debugger and REPL for PHP.
Have you ever wondered why when you type <?= $page->image() ?> the rendered result is an image tag? $page->image() would normally return a file object, but because we are echoing it here, the magic __toString() method kicks in and converts our objects well... magically. Here's magic methods explained.
Tools
html2svg takes the HTML you throw at it and converts it to.svg (or other formats like.png or.pdf). I only gave it a quick shot but looked quite promising. If you want to know more about the technical background, check out the blog post.
Regex-Vis visualizes regex patterns, but also lets you edit them.
Fontjoy: Let deep learning generate your next project's font combinations.
A11y
A guide to making websites keyboard accessible in two parts. Part 1 covers HTML and CSS, part 2 Javascript.
Scott O'Hara on the usefulness of the CSS visibility property in certain responsive webdesign use cases (for lack of a better solution).
This & that
In case you are planning to switch from Twitter to Mastodon and not really familiar yet with how it all works, check out this comprehensive Mastodon guide.
In his article The IndieWeb for Everyone provokingly subtitled "considered harmful", Max Böck looks into why the decentralized web is hard to understand for non-techies and what it needs to shift expectations and reach a wider audience.
Shell Script Best Practices: Some opinionated tips.
Do spellcheckers send sensitive data to servers ? Aaron Gustafson shares his test results.
The Art of the Command Line is a multi-language one-page guide explaining important CLI commands worth knowing.
Interesting read on using the Wayback Machine to salvage rotten links by providing a link to the Wayback Machine URL as a fallback for failing links.
The console is a powerful tool, not only for debugging but also for running scripts. Dear console collects a set of console scripts for copy & paste use or to extend upon.