Kirby CMS – or a tale of two support teams
6 May 2026
If you have visited my blog before you may remember a post from a few months ago about a frustrating experience upgrading FileMaker Pro – purchasing a license that was essentially obsolete before the credit card charge had cleared, with a sales team that saw nothing wrong with any of it. That issue, incidentally, was never resolved. But this post is not about FileMaker. This post is about what good customer service actually looks like – and a website relaunch that almost did not happen.
The problem
This website has been running on Kirby 2.5 for years. Kirby is a flat-file content management system (CMS) – no database, clean and elegant – and version 2.5 served us well for a long time. But software ages, and Kirby 2.5 was beginning to show its years. PHP support for older versions creates compatibility headaches as server environments move forward, and it was becoming increasingly clear that an upgrade to Kirby 5 was not just desirable but necessary.
There was just one problem: upgrading from Kirby 2.5 to Kirby 5 is not the kind of upgrade where you download a new version, click install and carry on with your day. It is, to put it plainly, a migration – and a substantial one.
What a Kirby 2.5 to Kirby 5 Migration Actually Involves
For those unfamiliar with what this kind of upgrade entails, it is worth briefly explaining why it is non-trivial.
Kirby 5 is a fundamentally more modern piece of software than version 2.5. The entire folder and file structure has changed. In Kirby 2.5, content, templates and configuration were organised in ways that simply do not map directly onto the Kirby 5 architecture. Template files need to be rewritten. The snippet system works differently. The Panel – Kirby's control interface – has been rebuilt. Blueprint files, which define how content is structured and how the Panel presents it to the user, use a different syntax and logic. Plugins from the 2.5 era are not compatible and need to be replaced or rebuilt.
In short: you cannot lift the old site and drop it into the new version. You rebuild around the content, carrying forward what matters and rewriting the machinery that drives it.
So far I had nothing to do with any of this, so perhaps understandably it was a very daunting prospect.
The license question
Before touching a single file, there was a practical question to resolve: licensing. Kirby 5 requires a new license, and while Kirby offers reduced pricing for educational use, my situation was not straightforward. I am an academic, but this is not a university website. It is my personal lab website – a place for sharing research, writing, and the kind of content you are reading now. Did that qualify?
Rather than assuming either way, I did what turned out to be the right thing: I simply emailed the Kirby team, explained who I was, what the site was for, and asked.
The response arrived the next day. They were happy to give me a Kirby 5 license.
For free.
I will admit that I sat with that email for a moment before responding. A single license is not enormously expensive, so this was not a dramatic gesture as such. But that is almost the point. It was a small thing for them that landed as a genuinely generous act. No interrogation of my credentials, no lengthy back-and-forth. Just: here is your license, good luck with the migration.
For context, in case you have not read the FileMaker blog post: a few months earlier, a sales representative at Claris had failed to mention that a new version of FileMaker Pro was weeks away from release – information that would have directly changed a purchasing decision worth considerably more than a Kirby license. The contrast could not be sharper.
This is how customer support should work. A huge thank you to the Kirby team for their generosity and for restoring some faith in the idea that software companies can still be run by humans who care about their customers.
The migration: enter Claude Code
With the license sorted, the migration itself still needed to happen. This is where my friend Tim came in – a software engineer who volunteered to help, and whose approach to the problem introduced me to something I had not seen in action before.
Tim's method was to use Claude Code, Anthropic's AI coding assistant, to do the heavy lifting. The process was straightforward in concept but remarkable to watch in practice: the entire site content and codebase was copied to a local folder, and Claude Code was then given access to everything it needed – all the files, all the structure, all the content – through nothing more than plain language instructions.
What struck me was how natural the interaction was. There was little need to specify file paths or explain the architecture in technical terms. You could simply describe what needed to happen – "headings in section XYZ are not rendering correctly", "the blog post template needs to pull the featured image from the page files", "for the main page the panel for uploading images does not show" – and Claude Code would locate the relevant files, understand the context, propose a fix, and implement it. When something did not work as expected, you described the problem in the same plain language and it adjusted. Not always perfectly clean, not always without keeping some legacy coding, but still: after a few hours of work, mostly prompting in AI, the entire content was largely migrated.
For someone who has spent years feeling vaguely intimidated by anything beyond the CMS interface, watching a complex migration handled through what amounted to a conversation was genuinely eye-opening. It did require Tim's expertise to guide the process. There were moments where judgment and experience mattered and where Claude Code's suggestions needed steering. But the volume of work that was handled automatically, correctly and quickly was striking. It would have taken me months to do the same thing myself.
What followed in the next week or two was that I meticulously overhauled every section of the site, identifying further errors and coding issues that were fixed. Content was checked and updated, templates were tested, the Panel was reconfigured. What might have taken months of painstaking manual work was compressed into something far more manageable.
The result
The site you are reading this on is the result. As far as I can tell, it works – and if you notice anything that does not, the contact page is there for a reason.
Kirby 5 is a genuinely excellent CMS. It is clean, fast, flexible and a pleasure to work with. The Panel is well-designed, the content management workflow is intuitive, and the flat-file architecture means there is no database to worry about. If you are considering a CMS for a personal or small organisational site and want something that gets out of your way and lets you focus on content, I would recommend it without hesitation.
And if you contact their support team with an awkward question, may that be about licensing or other issues, I am quite confident that they will surprise you with their knowledge, expertise and generosity.
The FileMaker Pro experience referenced in this post is documented in an earlier entry on this blog.