Good evening all,
I got curious about Kirby as I’m quite fed up with the WordPress transition to Block Themes and can’t stand the useless complexity of headless + Node based approaches for simple marketing websites.
However I downloaded the plain kit, unzipped in my MAMP root inside a folder named kirby_cms, have set the RewriteBase /kirby_cms in .htaccess and can’t access the panel. I just get “Not Found”. The base url says “Home”. Panel not there for me…
Excellent start I’d say! Can anyone please give me a hand? 
Thanks very much!
Hi! Welcome to the community 
Recent versions of MAMP have mod_rewrite disabled by default, which is a bit daft of them. You should not need need to set the rewrite base. You need to go into the PHP.ini and enable the mod_write extension and reload MAMP. Then the default plainkit download with the default .htaccess file should work fine.
Are you using the free version of MAMP or the Paid version? I think the difference is that the paid for one allows you to setup multiple sites under the same installation? I think if you set up a distinct site in MAMP rather than using a subfolder in the root, anything should be fine, but its been a long while since i used MAMP. Personally I use Herd
Thanks very much James. This of course did it. Frankly it didn’t occur to me that mod_rewrite module (in httpd.conf) could be disabled. As you very well say, it’s a bit daft of them.
Testing the CMS now and giving another shot to ExpressionEngine too (it’s been years since I last used it). WordPress at present is a mess and the whole Node ecosystem excellent if you need to build proper web apps, but simple content based websites… come on, ridiculous. Cheers!