Hi, I’ve used Kirby for a few websites and like it very much. The site were mainly simple things, like portfolio sites. No question there that Kirby has me covered.
I’m just wondering though, especially before pitching Kirby to clients - what would be possible usecases where Kirby wouldn’t be first choice? I’m not so deeply into Kirby to already having bumped into any walls, so I would love to get some feedback on this.
Mind you: not to diss Kirby, not at all! Just to make sure that if/when Jeff Bezos comes to me asking to relaunch his shopping website, I know where I stand with this CMS.
If it would be weird to talk Kirby-cannots openly in the forum, more private messages would be welcome, too.
Kirby can handle a lot. I’ve built quite a few sites with it. I have a site with nearly 3 gigabytes of content - Kirby doesn’t even flinch. I have another site with well over 200 pages of very long content on most pages…again… doesn’t even flinch. I can also tell you it can handle 140,000 images without much hassle.
There are however, very specific cases where it might be better to store content in a database rather than flat files… but… you know what… Kirby can totally do that too.
As for e-commerce, you can totally do your own with Kirby using the Merx plugin or via Shopify if you need a lighter solution.
All I can say is try it out. I can honestly say, in 4 years of using Kirby, I havent yet hit a project that could not be done.
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Limits are usually due to limit of the file system. Or rather how you structure your content and how you implement search or filtering.
It is usually recommended not to use thousands of pages inside a single parent without a tree structure, which means that rather then putting thousand of articles directly into a blog folder as subpages, it would be better to separate them by year or category inside this parent page.
Also, using $site->index()->filterBy() on a large site is not really recommended either. Limit what you have to search/filter as much as possible.
As @jimbobrjames already mentioned, there are use cases where a database for some parts of the website might actually make sense. Luckily, you can combine content from Kirby’s flat file system with content from basically any data source and provide a streamlined experience in the Panel for editors.
If things are not available out of the box, you can always add your own stuff and Kirby makes it relatively easy to extend almost every part of it. But that would then require coding skills or using third party plugins if available.
Replacing the Amazon website based on Kirby is probably not something you would want to undertake, though.
Alright, thank you both for the answer!
It seems that for all work that could ever come my way, at least content-wise there wouldn’t be anything that Kirby couldn’t handle.
The other big selling point always is the UX for clients in the back end . The other CMS I’ve been using for a long time is very configurable/extensible in the panel/manager area, so I could tailor a unique interface for every client need (it has a huge amount of technical debt though).
I must admit all my Kirby sites are still on Kirby 2. I had a few minor bumps in configuring the panel then. But from what I see, Kirby 3 has many more/new/better possibilities in the panel. So I’m very exited about checking that out.
Thanks again!
Panel customisations: You can have a little glimpse here: Made with Kirby and <3
With custom views, section and fields you have endless possibilities.
Also check out the roadmap: https://roadmap.getkirby.com
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