
Kirby is a file-based CMS - Tomte
https://getkirby.com/
======
omnimus
I dont have any connection to the company but for small webshops doing custom
small-mid sized sites this is awesome. We have many sites built in kirby and
its far better than any cms we have tried. And we tried everything.

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.

~~~
vorticalbox
What makes it more "mature" then say grav? Just started using it and it's
pretty good so far.

~~~
omnimus
Its much older. Kirbys admin is the big difference.

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.

~~~
unicornporn
Can I create custom fields for posts in the Kirby admin frontend (or any other
way??

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rumgewieselt
Sure! Take a look:
[https://getkirby.com/docs/panel/blueprints](https://getkirby.com/docs/panel/blueprints)

~~~
unicornporn
Excellent, thanks.

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cies
Seems to be not open source[1], which is a deal breaker for me. It is also in
PHP which I also frown up on for a rather new project in this day and age.

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).

1:
[https://github.com/getkirby/kirby/blob/master/license.md](https://github.com/getkirby/kirby/blob/master/license.md)

~~~
wishinghand
The license isn't free but it is open source, you can examine the entire
source code in that repo.

~~~
detaro
That's not open source by common definitions of the word, e.g. the most
commonly referenced OSI definition:
[https://opensource.org/osd](https://opensource.org/osd)

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unicornporn
Be sure to have a look at Grav. [https://getgrav.org/](https://getgrav.org/)

It's insanely awesome and open source. No database needed either. Can also run
more like a static site generator, without admin interface.

~~~
zer0t3ch
> Can also run -snip- 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.

~~~
omnimus
Sorry i misunderstood the question.

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.

~~~
zer0t3ch
Okay, thanks for the info. I'm not planning on doing any web dev as more than
a hobby, but it's good to have a go-to when I get another "client".

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eoincathal
I used Kirby for a travel blog a year ago. I needed something lightweight, for
which I could prepare material offline and then upload when I had
connectivity. Android phone + bluetooth keyboard were the preparation tools.

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.

~~~
sdoering
Would love to see that blog. Would that be possible?

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mateus1
Here's what I would love: A wysiwyg editor much like WordPress outputting
static HTML (maybe even directly to S3 buckets).

Does this exist?

~~~
smacktoward
You just described Movable Type
([https://movabletype.org/](https://movabletype.org/)), which was WordPress
before WordPress was WordPress.

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.

~~~
icebraining
Yeah, I learned about MT's approach from Jeff Atwood back in '09, and have
been reading about the new "discovery" of the static site generators with some
amusement.

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.

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soulwatcher
Looks like it is a paid CMS. Is it much different from Grav and Pico? I have
used Pico for a project and it is amazing.

~~~
omnimus
Its not very different but its more mature. It has awesome apis and it has
best admin interface.

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.

~~~
whorleater
The prices seem really reasonable ($17 for personal, $89 for commercial). Have
you found it reasonably usable for non-tech users?

~~~
ams6110
Is it just an honor system licensing? If it's a file based CMS, nothing
stopping me from putting the files on any webserver right?

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._

~~~
wishinghand
It is. Legally you need to pay a license to use it and to get tech support,
but if you never ask for support, no one is going around checking for non-
licensed users. I roll the fee into my expenses when I use it for clients.

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ArtDev
The price is a little difficult to find.

[https://getkirby.com/buy](https://getkirby.com/buy)

$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.

~~~
omnimus
Its been going strong for years. Its small well run german team of few devs.
It has solid userbase in europe (germany).

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).

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PythonicAlpha
The front page says:

    
    
        "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."
    

What other "awesome" sideeffects? I tried the link and found only a download
page. I also scanned threw the documentation and found no further statements
and no explanation.

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.

~~~
codingdave
It is just marketing spin. "File-based CMS" just means an editor/authoring
tool. FrontPage was a file-based CMS. Dreamweaver was a File-based CMS. Heck,
Sublime Text can be used as a file-based CMS, if you are comfortable with
WYSIWYG not being a requirement.

~~~
omnimus
I wouldnt say so, its cms that instead of database uses md files. But you can
do very similar things like with cms that has regular db.

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tylersgordon
Anyone know if this is the right tool for what we are trying to accomplish?

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.

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tomatsu
> _We can use another type of input instead of a CSV_

Popular static website generators like Jekyll can generate pages from YAML
files. Jekyll even supports CSV directly.

[https://jekyllrb.com/docs/datafiles/](https://jekyllrb.com/docs/datafiles/)

[https://jekyllrb.com/docs/collections/#step3](https://jekyllrb.com/docs/collections/#step3)

~~~
ioddly
I can second this. I've built an index of scientific papers before with
Jekyll's data feature. Built remarkably fast even with a lot of loops over the
whole dataset.

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GoodbyeEarl
Hey, folks! I've read the whole there but I couldn't figure out how to deal
with some dynamic content. Let me expose what I mean: I have a blog. I want to
create posts. So I'd write my blog post and publish (write my blog post to
disc as a static file). How could I instantly see the new blog post in my home
page?

~~~
pedroborges
When you write a blog post, it creates a text file (metadata & content) in the
/content folder, not an HTML file.

Take a look at the Starter Kit (it's the best way to try Kirby):
[https://github.com/getkirby/starterkit](https://github.com/getkirby/starterkit)

Look inside the /content and /site/templates folders.

~~~
GoodbyeEarl
Thanks man! But how do I loop through this content? ie How can I write a small
widget with all the recent posts?

~~~
pedroborges
You can do whatever you want on your templates. If by widget you mean reusable
code, you could use a snippet.

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>
    

Instead of fetching the post on the template, you could use a controller and
just pass the $latest variable to the template.

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crystalmace
With all the discussion around other decent options for Content Management
Systems, I'm surprised nobody has mentioned OctoberCMS
([http://octobercms.com/](http://octobercms.com/)) yet.

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](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 :)

~~~
jordanlev
Been a while since I dug into October, but last I checked its back-end admin
area was very much developer-focused (as opposed to non-technical site
maintainer)... editing content required editing actual code in a textarea. Has
this been addressed in the system at all (or is it even a design goal?)

~~~
omnimus
Exactly what i thought too. I couldnt find the reason for using admin area
since my clients wouldnt be able to use it. I guess the idea is to create
admin app for clients and this makes sense on big projects it can be done much
faster when you do something standard.

~~~
crystalmace
Depends on how you set it up. I usually use the RainLab.Pages plugin to have a
nice interface for clients to manage page content instead of having them use
the CMS editor.

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.

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pedroborges
I'm a web developer who have been happily using Kirby for over a year. I'm
available for answering question you might have about Kirby.

(I'm not affiliated with the Kirby team).

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franz976
Kirby is awesome. Mature, simple, clean, stong community, frequent updates.
Lovely.

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naringas
doen not seem to be open source

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aaronpk
The source code is here
[https://github.com/getkirby](https://github.com/getkirby)

~~~
gkya
The source is there but it's not free nor open source. See the license. I
don't know if they're allowed to put such licensed code on GitHub as a public
repo.

~~~
sdoering
And why should it be. Someone invested time and wants something in return.

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.

~~~
gkya
I only said that it's not open source, and did not say anything against it and
its being proprietary. And AFAIK github only allows public repos if they're
open source, I mentioned that. Read the thread.

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glasz
this is from the folks who made the now defunct zootool.com.

