MetaKnight — Win every SEO fight

In December we released MetaKnight — a search-engine-optimization (SEO) plugin for our go-to CMS Kirby. Let’s tell you all about it.

For those of you without any knowledge in this field, let’s start with a (really) short introduction to Kirby:

Kirby is a wonderful piece of software, that makes it easy for our clients to create, manage and update content on websites (CMS). But it does not do search engine optimisation out-of-the-box.

So after having created a few developer-focused Kirby plugins over the past years, we wanted to build something that also made maintaining Kirby-based websites easier for our clients (and other Kirby users).

During one of our company-wide hackdays a few people got together to think about plugins, that would make a difference for people using Kirby every day. One topic that quickly came to mind was search engine optimization.

We were handling the management of SEO-relevant meta information differently on every project. To be honest: It was a mess! Developers were reimplementing the same features over and over again and editors were facing an ever-changing collection of nondescript form fields. By building a feature complete SEO plugin we would be able to address both of these issues.

At the end of the hackday we had a first working version of MetaKnight. Over the next couple of months we tested it on different projects and kept refining MetaKnight further, eventually deploying it to a couple of client sites without any major hiccups.

So in December we released MetaKnight — a search-engine-optimization plugin for the flat-file CMS Kirby.

To get you more hooked on this little plugin, we’ll tell you all the features

Today, MetaKnight makes it possible to:

• see a live preview of what your page will look like in the Google Search results right inside Kirby’s admin panel.
• see a live preview of what the page your are editing will look like when its link is shared on Twitter and Facebook.
• never have to worry about cropping social media images by hand — the plugin does it for you automatically.
• get to have a say in what search engine crawlers get to do with your website.
• set site-wide fallback meta information that will be used when fields are left empty.

And of course it provides all relevant meta data in the source code of the page.

Go give it a try yourself — we are awfully proud of it. Because MetaKnight made working with SEO-relevant information so much easier we decided to open-source the whole project — happy to be giving back to the Kirby community that helped us in so many other ways.

In this context an honourable mention goes to Nico Hoffmann, who is part of the Kirby core-team and helped us get off the ground with plugin development. Thanks, Nico!

diesdas.digital is a studio for strategy, design and code in Berlin, featuring a multidisciplinary team of designers, developers and strategists. We create tailor-made digital solutions with an agile mindset and a smile on our faces. Let’s work together!

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