Jesse Orndorff

Kirby & Content First

Field & practice

About 6 months ago I had a project that required a lot of custom content publishing. Over the years Wordpress and I have grown into a love/hate relationship. So I thought this would be a good time to start looking at other content management systems.The CMS I always heard designers talking about was Expression Engine. While I had never used it before, I thought it looked like a great fit for the project I was working on. As I started to dig deeper into the guides and tutorials, I realized something. Something tragic to my design/development career. I had been so focused on pixel perfect designs, that I would often leave the content to the client. I would let them figure out what information needed to go on their site. After all I was just hired to push pixels, not guide them in the best way to organize their content. Boy was I wrong.

A New Life

I felt like I was free! Free from the idea that design was only about the look & feel and not the content. (No one put that idea in my head, it's just what I thought.)

Going forward I wanted to be a person who looked at the content first. Then focus on developing a website around the type of content. I started writing up guides for my clients and looking at ways I could change my business immediately. After years of just designing stuff, I felt like someone gave me a new life, a new sense of direction.

Kirby

I spent a lot of time looking for a new CMS. I decided that I needed a system that allowed me to easily define custom content. Then easily incorporate my code into the websites. I know my way around PHP well, so I wanted to find something that would work well with my existing knowledge. So Ruby was out. Even though Jekyll looked like a great solution. I noticed that (twitter: maguay) was talking about using something called Kirby for his next website. He kept talking up the fact that it used Markdown to handle the content styles. Being the big fan of Markdown I am, I took a look. After downloading the source from GitHub, I had my website on the CMS and working on my local machine within 4 hours. Never had I experienced so little of a learning curve with a CMS.

Seriously, how easy is this:

<?php echo $page->text() ?>

A few of the features I have fallen in love with:

  1. Custom Define ANY Content
  2. Simple File System
  3. The PHP Tags are amazingly simple. (Do you know how to write an echo?)
  4. Since it's a flat level system, I can easily use Git!