Kirki 4 is in the works
Hey everyone,
I’m happy to let you know that we have just started to work on Kirki 4! Ari Stathopoulos has left us with a great foundation and things are coming together nicely so far.
Roadmap
We are working on Kirki in stages. Currently, we focus on all the individual controls.
Here is a list of tasks that we want to get out of the way before announcing Kirki 4 for public beta testing:
- Go through all core controls. Fix & improve + adjust styling where necessary.
- Go through Arguments, Modules & Advanced Modules. Review & improve where necessary.
- Double-check backwards compatibility
- & review all other parts of the plugin.
Upcoming Beta Test
After all that is done, we will focus on testing Kirki 4 with themes we know are use Kirki as a part of their customizer experience and call for beta testers.
We have planned to give ourselves & everyone else a 1-month transition time to make eventual adjustments before Kirki will officially be released. Of course, this timeframe will be extended if we run into any major issues during the testing phase.
The transition month starts once we call for beta testers. Public beta testing should start around November or December, 2021.
Ari tried calling for beta testers once before but couldn’t collect enough feedback to comfortably release Kirki 4 to the wild. That’s why we need as many members of the community that are using Kirki in their themes to jump on board.
The last thing we want is to break websites with the release of Kirki 4.
During this month, we will work closely together with the community on GitHub. I will create an issue there once things are ready to be tested & send out another email newsletter.
Documentation
During the testing phase, I will update the documentation to reflect the changes in Kirki 4.
Kirki 4 will be backwards compatible but the way we register controls, etc. has changed. That’s why we need a complete rewrite of the documentation. The documentation for the current version of Kirki will stay for backwards compatibility reasons but probably move to a different domain. Something like v3.kirki.org.
Support
Support for Kirki is still currently on hold. This allows us to better focus on the development side of things. GitHub issues & WordPress support forum requests are currently ignored.
Wrapping up
I’m really happy about how things are coming together for Kirki 4. Our absolute top priority is to nail down the base functionality of the plugin and later improve on that foundation – also with the Kirki PRO add-on.
I don’t have any news for you on Kirki PRO, except that we have tons of ideas for it. It’s too early to make any decisions here just yet though. We want to release Kirki 4 with as little issues as possible before starting to look into Kirki PRO.
10 Comments
Great news David, thanks a lot!
I want to suggest some ideas.
I want to suggest alternative *v2 controls as well. I like having things backwards compatible, but i would also prefer to have fully modern controls, with responsive support, multi-unit etc. , so i propose on creating new v2 controls. It would allow more freedom and creativity too.
This would also avoid an immense amount of work and support from your end trying to maintain/refactor the current controls. Plus, the current controls seem stable enough to let them be.
I’m sure Kirki users are developers and just having a DB update script available would probably be enough to convert controls to the new version.
Thanks again!
Hey Marius,
Ari already refactored all controls for v4 and we will be building upon that.
One control for instance is the color control. Ari has used react-color for it which I believe is also used in Gutenberg core. We switched from react-color to react-colorful the other day as it is much lighter.
But I totally get what you’re saying. We have responsive controls and multi-unit controls on our radar. We’ll later have to see if it makes sense to give certain controls a “responsive”-argument or if it’s easier to create standalone controls for that.
Let’s goooo, Looking forward to Kirki 4.
Great news! But not in good time… Currently I’m working on my theme which is based on Kirki, I’m in 1/4 way and now… I need to wait for v4 😀
No need to wait for v4! 🙂 It’ll be backwards compatible.
So tell me pls, if the way we register controls will change, will be possible to re-new control for the new way without loosing previous settings? And, are there plans for accordion field, to group some settings, without using nested sections?
Yes, that will be possible. We don’t have any specific plans yet for future functionality or controls – just ideas. This will be something we focus on after Kirki 4 was released.
This is good news. Glad you guys are chugging away and making updates. I’ve been using Kirki for a theme I started a few months back, I’m very pleased with how the Customizer section has came along thanks to Kirki. I’ve been able to put together some complex settings with ease.
I look forward to testing the upcoming beta.
My site is completely down after updateting to v4…
Can you please create an issue on GitHub with as much information as possible? Debugging (as explained here – https://wp-pagebuilderframework.com/docs/debugging/) should give us some more insights on what’s causing the issue. Thank you.