This afternoon I upgraded three of my sites using Kirby to the new version Kirby 4. It was super easy and nothing that bugged me really actually had to do with Kirby itself, but upgrading to a newer version of PHP here on my local machines.

I, for example, use Mamp on my Macs and older versions of PHP were installed locally. When I recognised that auto upgrading did not work, I tried to install Mamp manually by clicking on the upgrade function inside of Mamp. It threw an error stating “MAMP (PRO) can not be installed yet” and some details, that I followed, which did not help in the beginning. I then downloaded the Mamp installer, but it gave me the same error when starting the installation. For one of my Macs I had to rename the Mamp folder to get the installation started even, then rename it back to the original name and continue installing. Then I got the error “The installation cannot be continued”. After a bit of research I found out, that I had to kill all processes with the names “httpd” (there were around 20–30 running) and “mysqld” (also quite a few of them running). After killing those, I was finally able to install a newer version of Mamp with more options for new PHP versions also.

My first recommendation for the actual Kirby upgrade is to definitely check the Migration Guide for upgrading to v4. It has a lot of valuable information and if you read it before upgrading you avoid a few smaller pitfalls maybe and get smaller issues sorted easily.

Then I do recommend you to install new versions of PHP before upgrading Kirby. This makes sure you get rid of all problems that this PHP upgrade might cause, without you thinking that the Kirby upgrade has caused this error. I myself was running Kirby 3.9.8 and upgraded PHP to 8.2, which caused some minor issues that I needed to fix. After that, the Kirby Upgrade went extremely smooth on my neu•gierig website, as well as on the website for Karl’s and my new event Better by Design. For my blog here, I had to add PHP type hints, that have been added, but that was it.

I had issues to perform the upgrade directly from the Kirby 4 Panel, but removing the old .license file made it possible for me to add the new license in the Panel.

I am a massive fanboy of Kirby anyways, but this new upgrade feels so good already. Excited to work with it, especially using the panel a bit more.

If you want a demo of some of the new features, next to reading the Release Notes, you can watch the recording of the little release show that Bastian and I streamed last Thursday. Enjoy!

Exciting news: Kirby 4 is here. Upgrade now to save 20% on each license. Super happy for Bastian and the Kirby team to see the release as I know how much work it has been for them. And sooo many promising new features and enhancements. Have a look yourself.

Excited to see if my pages are easy to upgrade. A few other things to be done before I can have a look, but already looking forward to this.

On that note: there are a couple of Kirby meetups planned in Munich, Hamburg and Düsseldorf, in case you want to hear more about the latest version. I gonna be at the Düsseldorf edition and Basti also. We are planning to do an episode of Stay Curious for the new release also, like we did for the last version as well.

Skate Aid Night 2023 just happened on Saturday. I went again and it is great to see how many people supported Skate Aid again to make kids strong through skateboarding and giving them a purpose. This time my daughter Luca joined me, which made me really happy. ☺️

Skate Aid and beyond tellerrand are partners for many years now and part of the ticket money always directly goes to Skate Aid to support their projects.

To my mother who’d have birthday today!

ffconf is an event in Brighton founded and organised by Remy Sharp and his wife Julie Sharp. I know both for a long time and we share a lot of common things when it comes to running events. We run events, because we love running those and bringing people together for which we curate a set of speakers for a certain amount of time. In their case for one day at beginning of November. Julie and Remy, as well as I, come out of a very tough time for event organisers that don’t take their budgets out of a companies yearly marketing budget. We rely on people buying tickets and partnerships with companies who like what we do, who see a sense in sponsoring as they might have a benefit and who keep our events alive with their money.

What makes events like ffconf so important for me is not only the personal curation and with this often much more interesting talks, but also the personal connection people have with those events and the kind of people you meet and are able to exchange with.

Last week Friday, at ffconf, I had so many lovely conversations before, during and after the event that are fantastic input, motivation and thoughts that are different to mine and give me other perspectives. For me personally that is so much value and I hope that events like ffconf stay for a long, long time. What you can do to make sure that this is the case? Well, if you attend events like ffconf, Patterns Day, or mine, beyond tellerrand you can:

• Get your tickets early – organisers need to plan and work with the incoming money
• Check their sponsorship prospectus – often times sponsorship starts at a lower cost than you think and even the smallest packages help big times
• Tell other people about it – there is no big marketing budget, so you, spreading the word, means the world

Especially the last part is an investment in the future of these events.

Thanks a lot to Julie, Remy and their team for this years joyful event and in my case also to Andy Davies, who made it possible that I could be part.

Before 2019 I visited Brighton every year for 13 years. Often more than just once a year. Events happening in Brighton are only a few these days. One of them is ffconf and I am looking forward to it!

Vasilis van Gemert has been one of the speakers last week at border:none. He has written about the gist of his talk, with which he was closing the event. He closes his write-up with the following paragraph …

In ten years I would love to do another talk at the next border:none conference. And I would love to do a very happy talk then. About the incredible tools that we’ve been using in the previous ten years that truly let you design all layers of the web: the visible, the invisible, the UX layers. I want to talk about all the people with disabilities who’ve joined our design teams and started designing for truly accessible UX. And I would love to show all the incredibly beautiful and fantastic websites you’ve all been making on our wonderfully weird web. Please make it so. I don’t want to switch to a different industry.

That is a great wish and idea. I support this and am looking forward to his talk in October 2033!

⇾ Visit: Let’s Reinvent the Wheel – Vasilis van Gemert

Tom Arnold, who was attending border:none 10 years ago also, has written a nice recap of his experience last week at border:none in Nuremberg. Thank you Tom!

⇾ Visit: border:none 2023 – Tom Arnold

Jeremy Keith, one of the speakers at last weeks border:none, has written about the event Joschi and I organised. Thanks for that and thanks for being part of this little adventure.

At the end of the event there was some joking about returning in 2033. I love the idea of a conference that happens once every ten years. Count me in!

Well … see you in 2033! ;)

⇾ Visit: border:none 2023 – Jeremy Keith