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Goodbye WordPress - Hello Kirby
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After more than 15 years of running on WordPress, I am launching my new website based on Kirby CMS today.
Challenges with WordPress
Themes
I had been using WordPress for my photography website since late 2009. Initially, I had gone through a few versions of what was called ProPhoto (a “premium” theme), and then at some point in time, I changed to a lighter theme I found on ThemeForest. That theme ended up being abandoned by its developer a bit more than a year after I had purchased it, and with each version update of WordPress or php (of which there were a lot), some part of it started to act just a little more strange.
Plugins
As a software engineering framework for extending the functionality of an IT solutions, plugins are great and can be very useful. The problem with WordPress plugins is that one (or even a handful) are rarely enough, and the more plugins you add, the more potential for creating problems such as
- the plugins “not getting along with each other”, i.e. creating incompatibility errors or functionality conflicts,
- negatively impacting the page load time and general performance of your site (which, ironically, you’ll likely be advised to remediate by installing yet another plugin for page-caching),
- depending on the mercy of plugin developers and their desire or motivation to maintain the plugin, fix errors or add new features (and let’s not sugarcoat it, some of these folks are real jerks).
Not to mention the financial aspect - it feels like everyone is trying to make a monthly buck nowadays for what sometimes seems to be the most minuscule amount of added functional value.
User-Friendliness
If you are (were) a fellow WordPress user, your mileage may vary on this - but for me, the point where the experience went decidedly south was when they introduced the “Gutenberg” block editing experience. I thought the design was incredibly user-unfriendly and clunky, and until the end I avoided it like the plague and instead used a plugin to maintain the “classic editor” experience.
Also, even with all the admin options accessible through the panel, I still had quite a few cases where I ran into code issues. And while I would consider myself an experienced WordPress user, I am not a php or css programmer - and I am neither aspiring to be one, nor do I want to spend the time learning it just so that I can work around issues caused by other coders.
Lastly, each time I logged on to WordPress admin, I would dread the never-ending streak of updates to the core and to my plugins. It just felt that too much time that I would have wanted to use for content creation was lost for just doing the bare necessities to keep the site up-to-date and running.
So I started to look around what other options are available these days.
Enter Kirby CMS
Early on during my search, I discovered Kirby CMS and instantly liked how lean, clean and simple it looked on their website. There was a point of doubt for me in the beginning as I wasn’t sure how much of my own php knowledge or programming would be necessary - but after I was able to get their “starter kit” (with some sample content) installed and running in a few minutes, I started to feel a bit more confident. Then I found out that there is an awesome amount of documentation, as well as a very friendly and helpful-looking support community, available which further motivated me to probe along a little further.
At its core, Kirby CMS is a file-based content management system: Instead of using a database, all content is stored in easy-to-manage text files and folders. This comes with performance benefits, since there is no need to query a database each time the website loads. Kirby also comes with a template language and customization options that allow you not only to design and style any page templates that you need to your liking, but also to build your unique personal admin back-end.
I discovered that some good folks are offering such pre-customized packages as “Kirby Themes”. In order to save time on my onboarding curve, I chose Marco Koedam’s ZOON theme. For me, it hits the sweet spot offering a no-nonsense content creation environment including all elements that I would want for page content, great fonts, and additional useful details such as built-in Open Graph tags and an XML sitemap.
Even though I am a php coding noob, I managed to make some small modifications such as adding different social network platforms for page sharing, and adjusting the contact page compared to how it came out of the box.
Furthermore, I added two plugins for specific functionality that I was looking for:
- Maurice Renck’s Komments plugin to allow visitors to leave comments, and
- Nico Hoffmann’s Retour plugin to configure re-directs for visitors who are trying to reach my content with previously valid URLs
I am sincerely grateful to Marco, Maurice and Nico for having created these components that greatly helped with my Kirby CMS onboarding. All of them are exceedingly well documented, and thus allowed me to focus on adding a lot of content for today’s initial launch.
Next Steps
I am looking forward to expanding my website content with Kirby CMS in the future. In the Singles section of my site, I want to try to post as regularly as possible. In addition, I will still continue to (manually) migrate content from my previous site into the Singles section.
I will do the same for some of the content from my social media feeds, because if the last few years have shown anything, it is that you shouldn’t take the status quo of any social network site as a given. Enshittification is real, and the only way to truly own your content is to host it on your own site.
As far as functional enhancements, currently my only wish for the future is to be able to add an RSS feed. I tried a few of the ways that are suggested online, but each of them exceeded my php coding abilities, respectively the time that I was willing to commit to potentially find a trial-and-error solution. Marco has indicated that RSS is something that he might add into a future update of the ZOON theme, so I will just wait a bit.
Conclusion
My decision to leave WordPress was driven by the desire to rid myself of its time-consuming maintenance and the dependence on the whims of theme and plugin developers. On the contrary, Kirby promises to help me focus on content creation with its simplicity, clarity and speed. I look forward to using it, and to seeing where this journey is going to take me and my website.
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This page has 2 comments - please leave one, too!
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Maurice -
Thank you for the kind words, Norbert. It’s great to see more people use Kirby for blogging, and it’s always cool to see my plugins working on other websites. So, welcome to the Kirby-Club!
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Norbert Woehnl -
Thanks a lot, Maurice! I couldn’t be happier than having you be the first person to leave a comment (or should I say komment) on my Kirby site! Thanks again for the plugin, and I look forward to building more content on this new site.
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