I‘m thinking of potentially migrating my hobby project zenpen.club, from Webflow to Kirby. I‘m now designing a much expanded version of the current live site, which includes many more CMS collections and relations between them. The reason I‘m considering moving from Webflow is that as I grow the CMS entries, Webflow‘s price keeps increasing.
But the most challenging part for me would be: How long would it take me to learn enough Kirby so I can build my site?
I‘m thinking of designing it in Weblow, exporting the code from there, and implementing Kirby. It would be tricky since I haven‘t touched code for 10 years, but before that, I was pretty good at HTML/CSS. So, it‘s going to be a real challenge.
Obviously, if this were a profitable project, I would‘ve asked a Kirby expert to do the coding and CMS implementation, but since it‘s still just a hobby, I‘ll either take the challenge and implement Kirby on a Webflow-exported code, or stick with Webflow for a year or two, and if Zenpen becomes profitable, I can consider a Kirby expert.
If you are curious, this would be the homepage of the new Zenpen.
I don’t think anyone can tell you how long it will take for you to “learn” Kirby. What I personally appreciate about Kirby is its simplicity. Not by being necessarily super approachable but rather by being very “close to the metal” if that makes sense.
For example all of your “collections” would be pages that ideally live somewhere like quotes/quote-1, authors/rajesh-kamath and books/baba. That means as a first step it’s very important to think about a fitting folder structure.
Anyway, for me, Kirby was a great way to learn web development so if you’re interested in becoming independent from services like Webflow I can’t recommend it enough. The community here is also one of the most friendly and helpful ones in the internet.
Yes, that was an overly generic and naive question to ask, namely, how much time it‘ll take me to learn Kirby. I wrote it in a rush.
Now that I have more time to think, I decided to stick with Webflow just because of my deep familiarity with it, and because otherwise, learning Kirby, while it might not be the biggest obstacle, re-learning myself to code will undoubtedly be.
So, I‘ll sacrifice and not display some CMS relations on the new Zenpen website because Webflow will require too many workarounds, and site performance might suffer. But in the long run, if I get enough traction and interest in this ancient niche of having a website for quotes, I‘ll definitely consider Kirby as I scale up into 10,000+ CMS entries. There is a CSV export in Weblow, so as long as there is a CSV import in Kirby for the CMS, I should be fine.
I can motivate you: My first Kirby project was a multilingual website. At first, I was worried that the learning process might delay the planned release date. But the small “wow” moments during development made me very optimistic. You won’t be able to unlock Kirby’s full potential right away. But you’ll continuously discover new features that you can integrate into your project and not only will your knowledge grow step by step, but also your confidence that with Kirby, you don’t have to make compromises. Later, I also wrote a script to convert a page with over 500 entries into individual subpages. Thanks to the help I received here in the forum, it worked perfectly.
Thanks for the encouragement @GB_DESIGN. I‘m sure I can handle Kirby, but I‘m afraid getting back to actually coding the website will take me forever. In the past, I was writing vanilla HTML and CSS code, but front-end development has changed so much since then. I don‘t even know how to work with a command line to set up dev environments. I tried to embrace modern front-end tech stacks a few times recently, and I realized how much I suck at it. That‘s my biggest obstacle. As for learning Kirby, it‘s not a big problem. I‘ve been implementing many sites on ExpressionEngine in 2008/2012, and I know how much freedom does an open-source CMS gives.
