New to Kirby and have a question before implementing it

Kirby 3
1

Hi,

I am the webdev for The Forensic Nurse and have a question about using Kirby.

I have tried using Perch for the blog area on the front page but their appalling lack of customer support has left my client asking for a refund which is why I am here.

I would like to know if Kirby can be used to implement a blog on the index page which has a ‘recent posts/popular posts’ section. It probably can, but how easy would it be to implement?

Perch had a blog module which was a bit complicated to get going with, even though there were videos on how to do it. The problem was that there was an assumption that previous pages were created as part of a Perch CMS site, which was not the case here. All I wanted was the blog area done. Lack of customer service drew me here.

2

Welcome :slight_smile:

Sure, Kirby can be used to create a blog. There is an extensive guide in the Cookbook for creating one. You certainly can easily pull in recent posts from the blog area into another page, but the popular posts idea would be trickier. You would need some way to record the views and display them accordingly. However, im sure there have been some threads on the forum in the past for doing that so have a search and you might find some solutions to that.

Some useful resources…

If your home page is not Kirby powered, you can enable Content Representations which will give you the content in JSON format so that you can pull it into something else. You can also use the API.

https://getkirby.com/docs/guide/templates/content-representations

3

Hi jimbobrjames,

Thanks very much for the quick response and the info provided. It bodes well for the future of using Kirby. If the popular posts idea is a bit more complex then I will just do recent post until I get used to using Kirby and deal with that part of it at a later date.

4

As a kirby fan I can say:

  • Kirby is very modular
  • In kirby everything is a page, pages are the basic unit of work, you can do pretty much anything with pages
  • Use templates to create collections of pages: blog posts, products, services, etc.
  • Use filters to extract from collections by template, tags, categories, dates, etc.
  • Also kirby has extensive documentation and outstanding forum
5

To create popular posts you need to decide how you want to measure popularity:

  • Clicks
  • Page views
  • Favs
  • Comments
  • Etc.

This have to be done manually.
Pages can have a hidden field where you count hits.
You can create a PHP script to increment the counter every time a page is hit.
Maybe you can do that in a controller.
Then display popular pages by filtering a collection by their counter field.
There might be other ways to do this, like a plugin.