I’ve been building a website for my sister, who is starting out as a concert photographer, and needed a CMS that is easy to extend and strong at managing images. I knew from the start I wasn’t going to recommend Hugo to her.
Her site isn’t live yet, but after working on it I had the urge to move this one from Hugo to Kirby as well. I knew Craft CMS through Jasper but wanted something lighter, and Strapi and similar headless CMSs weren’t what I was after either, as I wasn’t keen on building a frontend. I think putting everything behind an API and building apps on top of it is something to be chosen very carefully, I’ve seen too many developers go API-first even for small projects, only to end up buried in API design and alignment, caching issues, resource bundling. I can’t deal with that overhead. After a short search I ended up with Kirby. What surprised me is how simple and fast it is to work with, as a developer and as an end user.
But wasn’t I happy with Hugo? Well, a few things kept turning into bigger problems. The whole site lived in a GitHub repository, my photos included, so every image and every post went into the repo, which was at 4+ GB. Simply checking out the repo and committing wasn’t possible anymore, and writing a post on the go only worked through detours. Now I can write down thoughts or prepare a post from my phone, look at a preview and publish it when it’s ready.
Some of what Hugo couldn’t do I had worked around with JavaScript, like collecting statistics per post, which ended up putting more JavaScript on the site than I ever wanted. This was my chance to undo most of those workarounds. Migrating the design was easy, and I even brought back features like the “Like” button.
The source code remains available on GitHub.
This website has been running on Kirby since Tuesday. Did anyone notice?
