Kirby CMS Zen

I've spent a little time working on my Kirby CMS based main website today. I love most of the things about my site, but as I have extended it to do more complex things, I've become frustrated by some aspects of the workflow, layout and syndication... read on for a little more detail on what I've been working on, and am planning... 🔖#kirbyCMS #indieWeb

As I said above, I was really pleased with my website when I built it. I spent some time working on the front end a little while ago, preparing for some future upgrades. I introduced the concept of post type, starting to display each in slightly customised ways. Image posts for example layout with the image first, followed by the description. I also introduced an emoji driven by the post type on the blog listing page to denote the type. Most importantly, I took away a lot of the crap cluttering the article view, making article pages much cleaner.

The back-end experience has been frustrating me though, it just feels cluttered, and I really enjoyed writing on Scribbles instead over the last few days, although I'm not really sure where Scribbles fits in to my workflow. So today I've spent much of the day cleaning up the back-end on my main post type. As you can see, it looks pretty clean and crisp now, and the boring features that I need to use on some posts sit just below the fold within easy reach.

Lee PerryBurnley based canine parent. I talk about ⚽️ Burnley FC 🏃🚴‍♂️🧗fitness, 🚌🚝 exploring, 🎮 retrogaming, 👨🏼‍💻code and 🐕 Podencos.scribbles.page

The worst bit of the workflow was the post image which for a number of reasons previously needed to be attached in up to 3 places in any one article. Now it only needs to be loaded in the post image field, will automatically display in image posts, and will serve as the preview image for that post on social media cards.

I'm still frustrated though, and I guess if I had built this site from Kirby Plainkit rather than Starterkit, I'd have probably built something perfect from the off. Except I'd still be building it, never mind bringing 20 years of content together on this site.

I find my training content sitting in a different part of the site frustrating, though I designed it that way so that the content could be filtered into a different rss feed. Not everybody wants to see every workout that I do, though I feel similarly about my content stuck in Strava as I do that in social media... I just want my training log on my own site. I could merge the activities content in to my main blog now, with some alignment of blueprints, that could be very quick indeed.

I really dislike my dashboard - I think that looks incredibly cluttered. It does not really hurt the site in anyway, I just hate the general appearance of this. I want to split the sections out into full page tabs, which I know can be done - but my early forays with the site blueprint have failed.

Syndication is frustrating me, largely because I am not fully in control of my RSS feed. Indieconnector works great through to Mastodon, either providing image upload to Mastodon, or rendering the page preview card. Bluesky is less successful though, media upload has not been built into the plugin yet, but the card preview does not work either. I could share using echofeed which I have been testing on Scribbles this week - though that has the same shortfall driven not by the plugin, but by the limited content of my rss feed. If I can work out how to build an rss feed customised to the site and content, that contains image links in the feed, then echofeed can be setup to syndicate my content out to the relevant places exactly as desired.

In the front end I want to customise the blog page so that it is easier to filter into different content types and categories, I'd also like to do something more dynamic and enticing on my homepage - as well as working on the interaction between posts in the blog, and the digital garden pages that they are associated with.

So I guess, as I've basically got a month off coming up in a few weeks, it would be appropriate to set out a few actions:

• Separate content types into tabs in the Kirby CMS dashboard

• Design own RSS feeds or better customise existing to show content in feed readers, and to social media via echofeed, as desired.

• Implement font directly into website to remove Google Fonts network request

• Decide whether to retain tinylytics, to reduce that network request

• Design new homepage.

• Introduce streamlined category filters to the blog page.

• Considering using files to feed in post galleries, rather than a block within the blocks field.

• Reinstate code block colors from the original Kirby Starterkit theme (I loved this).

• Decide whether to integrate training feed into main blog. Thoughts?

• Streamline fitness blueprint in admin console similar to that created for notes.