New year announcements

Happy new year everybody!
I hope you had a great start so far. There are a few things I wanted to let you know about and the first real working day in the new year is kind of perfect for that.

OpenWe GmbH

Some of you might have noticed that the footer and the contact page have slightly changed. I'm super excited that Kirby will be published by the OpenWe GmbH. It's the company Habu – a very close friend of mine – and I have founded in 2007. Habu has been one of my professors at UNI and we soon became friends while working on various projects together. In 2007 we decided to found a company and build a location-based startup, which never saw the light of day, because simply nobody had a GPS chip in their mobile phone back then :)

That didn't really matter because soon afterwards Zootool was born and OpenWe became the company behind it. We both don't see it as a "company" but more as a solid base to run the things we love to do in our spare time.

It has been a no-brainer to decide to publish Kirby under the roof of the OpenWe GmbH as well. It makes so many things so much easier (legal stuff, tax stuff, etc.) and will help me to focus on the development of Kirby. I hope you will understand that decision and don't feel like there's a big bad company behind that tiny little CMS thingy now :)

Kirby License

Today I will release Kirby 0.9.9.1 to all beta users, so the launch is really getting closer now. I was thinking a lot about the license for Kirby. It has always been clear to me that this should not be an open-source project. Selling Kirby even for a small amount will make it easier for me to maintain this and put more time into it. I'm no fan of proprietary, expensive software though and I don't want to care about things like piracy. I decided to go a quite unusual way. The source of Kirby will be hosted on Github in a public repository. I see this as an additional benefit for every developer, who decides to build a site with Kirby. It's much easier for me to give you quick access to the latest releases, it's easier for you to check out all the stuff under the hood to build your own plugins and snippets and for those who find bugs it will be much easier to submit them or even fix them by forking the source and sending me a pull request.

You still must purchase a license if you want to use it in production and you are not allowed to redistribute or use the source or parts of it for any other project. I think that's more than fair. With PHP projects it's way too easy to steal the source and I hate obfuscated or encrypted code. So I think it will be easier to just go that way and to believe in trustworthy developers out there :) Call me naive, but if you need to steal a CMS, which costs € 30, then do it!

All plugins, snippets and other extensions, which I will provide on this site will be entirely free and open-source and also the included Kirby Toolkit will stay 100% free.

I'd love to hear your opinions on that license model in the comments!!

Little roadmap

I don't really have a fixed roadmap except making it better, writing more docs, plugins and snippets and keep it going. But there are some things on the horizon:

Search Plugin (will be released today)

Built-in multi-language support (will be released somewhere between 1.1 and 1.3)

Memory-based caching for super-sonic performance (will be released in 1.1 or 1.2)

Webinterface (will be released when it's done :))

I'm planning to keep the core as compact and tiny as possible, so pretty much anything, which is not 100% vital for running a basic site with Kirby will be available as plugin or snippet.