Kirby - a database-free CMS!

[David]

Those of you at the UP presentation on Wednesday will have seen Gary's file-based "CMS" and although it worked pretty well, I've usually steered clear of such solutions after a bad experience some years ago. So, it was with surprise that I noticed Smashing Magazine using a CMS for their new conference website called Kirby that turns out to be a file-based CMS! Here's a blog post with some background information on the site development.

There are many benefits to this approach, particularly in terms of ease-of-use. However, I am sceptical at how well the platform would scale. I haven't had time to look at it in detail but perhaps there is a caching system* that keeps file reads to a minimum.

Anyway, a Kirby licence costs just $30 but there is a free trial you can use for as long as you like.

Those of you still looking for a CMS for your Thesis Project might like to take a look.

* Here's the bit about caching. I have to say that after reading through the documentation, this looks like a pretty good low-tech approach to building a CMS. I think Gary has downloaded and is playing with it - I await his report.

[tomjeatt]

This looks fantastic - really want to give it a go, so I'm going to need to start a new project (not sure I have time for that!). I really want to get to grips with Jekyll too. Too much stuff, too little time.

[garypigott]

David, it's good to see other people designing a non-db solution....

I've not done very much with Kirby other than install it and the "Slacky" theme, it was a nice easy install. There seems to be quite a few plugins and snippets available (including twitter feed).

For people who dont want to get too involved in CMS (or don't want the learning curve) etc this might be for them, theres a few free themes around (like the Slacky one) and the thing supports just text files but thats kind of all comtrolled by the "theme".

If you know PHP I think this would be a great CMS as it (seems to) allow loads of flexibility, which is probably why Smashing went for it. As I said theres some free themes, most of which seem to be based around blog style sites; theres quite a few plugins including twitter feeds, email forms, RSS, galleries, search etc.

The slacky theme includes a "thumbs" generator which builds thumbnails of a specified size (so just upload and the gallery then automatically resizes it to the image specified in the code/theme).

There is the idea of "snippets" in the module library, this is essentially like "PHP includes" but from a centralised snippets folder..

I'm hoping to convert the projects part of the UP project to use kirby with (a variation of) the slacky theme, if I ever do it (and get it working!) I will post it on here and include a link to a ZIP version


Just read some of the online documentation - it makes it sound really easy; but I bet it isn't!

[David]

Kirby does seem to be used by some interesting people - I just noticed that Brendan Dawes is using it for his website. Also see this Kirby site and a recommendation by its creator.

[Vlad]

Oh this might be the way to go for my project. As my website does not involve clients or handing over my work, I do not really need a fancy back end UI. I bet this would give me much more flexibility, unlike what I experienced during the UP project with WordPress.
I have a question for Garry - to what extend do I need to know PHP for this to be worth pursuing? Thank you.

[garypigott]

Hi Vlad

From my initial look at Kirby, the themes etc are built using PHP code snippets, you would only need to know PHP if you wanted to develop your own theme - if you could find a theme that did what you wanted then you shouldn't need to know any PHP.

So if the slacker theme ( http://slacky.geek-rocket.de/) was right for you then you could go straight into that which is using pre-formatted text files ("Kirby text") and there seems to be a fair bit of documentation on the Kirby site about this.

It's only if you want to do other stuff, or write your own themes, that it would be helpful to know PHP (the plugins seem to be PHP based, so making use of those would need some PHP knowledge) but I think this kind of applies to all the CMS's unless you get an exact theme that matches. I would assume that as more sites build using Kirby the themes available will grow, there are a few already on the Kirby downloads section.

Cheers
Gary

If you want to know PHP the sitepoint book "Build Your Own Database Driven Web Site" by Kevin Yank is a really good book (I'm currently working my way through that).

[David]

If you want to know PHP the sitepoint book "Build Your Own Database Driven Web Site" by Kevin Yank is a really good book (I'm currently working my way through that).

Note that the 5th edition of this book has recently been published with a new title. It's now called PHP & MySQL: Novice to Ninja

[Vlad]

Thanks guy, I really need to consider this option, so I will give it a try and see what happens.

[Aimee]

Hmm interesting. Thanks for posting. A

[garypigott]

World of books have an old copy price £3.46 (incl postage) http://www.worldofbooks.com/build-yo...evin-yank.html