My first steps with Kirby

The CMS Questions
1

Hello everybody

I’m writing from Paris (France). I’ve just bought a licence and the fotograf theme
It’s a few € or $:scream:

I have very little skills about CSS and html, so I thought that it was very easy to customize… But it’s not really, isn’t ?

For example : how can I add some templates ?

I’ve got very few templates coming from the theme I’ve just bought. that’s nice but not enough. I’ve added some others coming from a free theme but the new template don’t show up. I can’t choose them…

Another big disappointement I’ve tried to activate the multilanguage but nothing happens. My panel does not show an english or french possibility…

If someone could lead me on the right tracks, i’ll be happy

thanks

2

Welcome to the Kirby forum :slightly_smiling:

Hard to tell without knowing the template.

In general, I suggest you read the Kirby documentation, it’s a bit much to answer such a general question here in the forum.

Basically, a template is called automatically depending on the file name of the text files in your content folder, e.g. if your text file is test.txt, Kirby will look for a test.php template. If the template does not exist, Kirby will fall back to the default.php template.

As regards the multi-lang feature, it is not enough to enable the languages in your config.php. You also need to rename your text files for each language, e.g. test.en.txt for English, test.fr.txt for French, etc. You also have to remove all text files without any language code extension, otherwise it will not work. That information is still missing from the docs, but we are working on it.

Some links that might help to get started:

https://getkirby.com/docs/templates/basics
https://getkirby.com/docs/templates/snippets
https://getkirby.com/docs/cheatsheet

3

Thanks for your answer !

I know it’s general questions and I’ve tried first to read the docs.

But I’m a bit upset because I’ve read everywhere that we don’t need coding skills to play with Kirby and I’m discovering that’s not true.

Because I know I have limited skills (let’s say I can customize with css that’s all), I’ve paid an extra $35 to start with an adapted theme which is also very limited…

For example : in my menu I just want to add subsection and I can’t do this quickly through the panel… That’s why I’m disappointed…

Cheers to all

4

Out of interest: Where di you read that you would not need any coding skills?

5

I was just about the ask the same question …

In fact, if you happen to buy a theme that exactly fits your needs or if the theme developer made it so that it is easily customizable, then that might be true.

If not and you want to adapt lots of stuff, then you do need coding skills, i.e. HTML, CSS and PHP.

6

Don’t need to argue.

If you read “Easy to setup. Easy to use.” in a front page
and that no code skills required

And if you’re stupid enough to believe what you read…

A few years ago I was able to customize and change my indexhibit website, I just thought Kirby would be almost the same…

I thought that I could buy a theme and try and mix between the specific theme and others options. It seems to be a little more tricky !

That’s all my fault, no worry

Cheers

7

We didn’t want to argue. Just curious from where this impression came from. If you are not happy with the theme you bought, I’d contact the theme developer.

8

I’ve contacted the developer, no answer yet.

But I really thought I can combine this theme with the usual possibility of Kirby.

I just realize that’s not as simple as I thought and not as “easy” as it is written…

9

Community: 3/5

That’s a little harsh, I think!

Coding skills required: No

Misleading perhaps?

  • Kirby is easy if you are developer
  • Even If you are only a content editor, editing content it’s easy, but for setting the website up you still need developer help or knowledge
  • I’m designer, I know a lot about HTM/CSS, but very little PHP, yet I find it very easy to use in general
  • I think what you need is a proper introduction, which most CMS’s don’t provide because they assume a developer audience
  • I’m sure Kirby is easy with a proper on boarding, even for non developers
  • Blogs tend to exaggerate, and CMS auto-descriptions tend to focus on the good parts
  • It’s up to us to look further

Don’t be disappointed, you just need a little push, that’s ok I think :thumbsup:
And I still think Kirby is pretty darn easy!

2 Likes
10

If you can’t select your added templates in the panel (backend), it might be the following problem:

In Kirby, the parent of a page defines which templates can be used for its children. For example

  • Open site/blueprints/site.php in your editor
  • There might be something like this …
pages: default

or

pages: 
  template: 
    - default
    - page
    - mytemplate
    - …

This is the place where you need to add your template names. site/blueprints/site.php defines the allowed templates for the root directory. If you want to use your templates as children of other templates, you have to change this setting in the corresponding blueprint file, too.

If you don’t want any restrictions at all and use all templates everywhere, simply change the line (in every blueprint file) to this:

pages: true

Maybe this is a starting point for you. Don’t hesitate to ask, if you have more questions. There are a lot of nice people here around who will try to help you with your Kirby adventure.

Give it a try :wink:

1 Like
11

You’re right, sorry. I was in a rush and didn’t try to understand. So I will try with my poor coding skills. Sorry for you, I will haunt that forum.

Thank you so much flokosiol for the[quote=“flokosiol, post:10, topic:3316”]
starting point
[/quote]

I’ve followed what you’ve mentionned but I’m still in the Darkness.

Basically, I would like to start with the fotograf theme I’ve bought and add some functionnality (a menu with subsection and slideshow for examples) from an other theme.

So I’ve changed the pages = true as flokosiol said
Then, I’ve added “folder.php” . The code is quite simple :

site/templates/folder.php →
<?php go($pages->findOpen()->children()->visible()->first()->url()) ?>

but that’s changing nothing in my navigation menu… I can’t show up a child page

I’ll dig up
Now I know that it would not be done with a snap !

Thanks

12

If you want to make changes to the menu: There is probably a snippet in the snippets folder called “menu.php” or similar that contains the menu. So if you want to make changes in the menu, that is probably the file you want to look into.

A typical menu in Kirby will look like this:

<?php

// get main menu items, i.e. all visible page (folders with a prepended number)
$items = $pages->visible();

// check if there are any items
if($items->count() > 0):
?>
<nav>
  <ul>
    //loop through the items
    <?php foreach($items as $item): ?>
    <li><a<?php ecco($item->isOpen(), ' class="active"') ?> href="<?php echo $item->url() ?>"><?php echo html($item->title()) ?></a></li>
    <?php endforeach ?>
  </ul>
</nav>
<?php endif ?>

For more information on how to create menus with submenus, check out this blog post
Without knowing the way the theme is coded, though, I can’t say for sure.