Kirby CMS or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Building a Website

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October 28th, 2017

WordPress - Using a hammer to crack a nut

Don't get me wrong, I like WordPress, or at least I like WordPress when used with Advanced Custom Fields. My problem with WordPress is that it's essentially a blogging tool, but in it's pursuit of trying to become the be and end all of web site development it's carries with it a lot of baggage.

When building DOT, it started to trouble me the amount of functionality that came with WordPress and the dozen plugins I anticipated installing never mind maintaining just for a basic content web site. I started questioning whether I should pull certain content from the database or just hard-code it inside the template. It's my site after all and no big deal for me to simply edit directly in the template.

And then I discovered Kirby CMS, the cure to my overly complicated web site building needs.

Goodbye Databases

I remember hearing about flat file CMS a few years back, but I didn't take them seriously enough to warrant building the kind of site's that I was producing at the time. A little more research and I was very quickly starting to become convinced. Kirby CMS started to stand out among the crowd, every review was like someone had discovered the holy grail and the documentation was all you could ask for when learning a new technology.

I took a punt for building the DOT web site and what an inspired choice it was deemed to be. The reality is that as a means to manage content on a site it fulfilled all my needs. Where it really wins though is through it's simplicity, speed and security over all the other CMS I've previously had experience with. Once you take needing a database out of the equation, life just gets a whole lot easier. It's like going back to a more simpler age of web site development when site's consisted of just a few html files whilst still being able to give the content control that modern websites desire.

Nightmare deployments are also a forgotten past. No more database synchronisation headaches when pushing live, we can pretty much let version control handle all this for us and go live's start to be in minutes rather than hours.

Goodbye Wordpress??

Wordpress still has it's place for me and for the time being at least I still see it being my main go to for web site builds. No database could be limiting for some projects but having Kirby CMS is certainly another option for builds that are a little more straight forward and was perfect for the build of DOT. I feel I'm also still scratching the surface of possibilities with the application and what's not to say that it in time it could become my CMS of choice.

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Do you need a web site that you can manage that is simple, secure and fast? Then get in touch with DOT.

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