I have just completed my first kirby site ! Overall I absolutely love it, I have never got up and running so fast with a cms before. Some small client based queries:
Markdown - clients do not get it at all. Is there anything like redactor or tinymce?
No easy way to link to another page in the textarea?
I wish the page widget could be in the left hand sidebar on all pages, a lot of clicking back and forth
A “Preview site” link would be useful in the top bar
The edit page area seems unnecessary, could we not just reorder the pages in the widget with drag and drop?
Anyway I am 100% converted (coming from craft & modx)
Unfortunately, there isn’t really a way around this. Markdown is great, and people normally get it after a little education. I have not tried it but there are a number of desktop markdown editors out there that might work well with it. Try Write (I know this one can read and write to remote files if you supply connection details) or iA Writer or Ulysses.
If nothing else, you can atleast write content with a live preview on the desktop and then copy and paste the markdown into Kirbies panel.
There are some other editors you might want to try: https://github.com/jenstornell/kirby-plugins/projects/1 (beware that I don’t know if all of them are still functional). As far as I’m aware, none of the alternatives supports page linking like the enhanced textarea field, though.
If you want a widget with drag and drop sorting of pages, you could try to create a custom widget. Currently, there is no other way around that.
But Kirby’s future will be bright, so hang on…
Often, however, people will finally accept Markdown, it’s just a matter of getting used to it. At times, it helps to structure content a lot more, using modules, or the page builder. That doesn’t remove the need for Markdown, but the more structured your content, the less Markdown you need.
The big advantage of using structured content is that users can’t mess up the complete page with the funny things they try to do in a visual editor.
This for me is a huge plus. A big part of my career has been working on bespoke CMS systems created for clients whilst working at creative agencies and I wouldnt like to guess how many hours ive wasted cleaning Database data after letting users lose with a TInyMCE powered field - they have a habit of pasting directly from word which carries with it a slew of hidden meta data that you cant see but it ends up in the database table. This in turn can mess up your page when it tries to render it in the browser. TinyMCE does have a button to clean up word pasted data but users find that difficult to remember.
Yep, very true. But pasting directly from Word is generally a bad idea. If you paste Word texts into a Kirby textarea field, you sometimes get funny side effects as well.
I know that and you know that but try stopping a copywriter in a different office from doing it without sitting with them and watching their every move… i don’t miss those days at all.
I agree with everything you both say about markdown - but some clients view it as coding and are just terrified by it Redactor is very good and I very rarely have to do any support and no cleanup.
I have used structured fields a lot with my first kirby site, but clients always need at least H1,H2 and link in the editor.
Page widget: Could also be achieved with a custom field, but maybe the prev-next field is useful
Preview link in the top bar: You could achieve that with a custom field that injects a site preview link (example how to inject something in the topbar: GitHub - kirby-deprecated-plugins/kirby-panel-flags)
Then the clients will at least be happier with the extended textarea field mentioned above. The good thing is you can just throw it in without making any changes to your site.
