First impressions of Kirby

Hello, I found Kirby about 5 days ago and want to share impressions, while they are fresh. To conclude, I think it’s the best CMS ever and the one, that I was looking for a long time. Or if I would create my own CMS, it would be just the same.

I am designer, and making websites from 2003. My first CMS was Mambo, which then became Joomla, but after some years I discovered Drupal, which was my number one for many years till now. It’s very flexible, has nice architecture, but to make additional features it’s quite costly, also multilanguage support for every part of website is not so easy. In version 8 templating became easier, but still content output is not so separated, for example with Views module.

In recent years making websites becomes easier for everyone, as there are many builders, saas, or Wordpress builders, like Elementor. I tried a lot of builders, because it seems wise to switch from separate CMS for each client to one infrastructure, that grows and is supported, and always have all features available there, easy to create and scale this way. I was checking a lot of builders, but didn’t find the one, that would make working with design easy and let output content in a flexible way, to have dynamic content like Projects, News, Team members (I mean not only block Projects, but page with Projects, and then ability to show certain Projecs on frontpage). Builders tend to focus on building, but not content. In real life there is no need to change padding or colors everyday, it’s normally made once, and then what client needs is easy work with content, withouth clutter. Also there is no builder that actually supports multilanguage. Some have this feature, but in reality it’s very hard to work with it. The closest to what I wanted was Webflow, it lets “code” without coding, easy to create design the way I want, but hosting is quite expensive. And still lacks flexibility sometimes, and multilanguage is not yet ready.

So, when I found Kirby and saw, what is possible to create, I thought it’s actually what I was looking for. It’s not saas or builder, but it’s possible to create building blocks, or modules, that are predefined, also easy to add new. So this way it’s possible to have premade blocks, that are usually used on website, like Slider, Gallery, Clients logos, Testimonials. So for simple website there is no need to create something new, I can just use those blocks. And still possible to add new features. And I like, that content is really separated from CMS. It remind me the times of first websites, that were fast, simple and focused on content, without heavy cms or security vulnerability. So Kirby gives this sense of simplicity, while working, but lets creating dynamic content easy.

With Kirby in a few days I was able to create website with multilanguage support, I like how it works: every field is translatable and there is no need to do something additional. Even alt or caption for images. All well thought. It’s just working. Installed theme with modular blocks, found how to add fields to them. Added fancybox support for images, also set up Projects section, got help in Forum, thank you! Also talked to some developers, seems that all is possible, like creating of directory with job ads.

Of course, what makes me fall in love is speed, it’s just blazing fast: frontend and backend.

It’s still a lot to learn, but I can’t wait to use Kirby in the next project!

11 Likes

Hey Roman,

thank you so much for your extensive and friendly feedback. Such first impressions are extremely valuable to us. After years of working on Kirby, it’s sometimes hard to take a proper look back and try to be a Kirby beginner again. It’s especially interesting to hear your thoughts after taking a look at so many different systems and approaches to content management.

I hope you keep on enjoying the system. Let us know whenever you need help!

2 Likes