Is Kirki abandoned?

[sebastianthulin]

Hello,

Since Kirki was acquired by Themeum, there has been minimal progress in its development and little communication regarding future plans. Could you provide some clarity on the future of Kirki?

Thank you.

[margolisj]

@sebastianthulin Seems like it, it might be time for a full fork. I've been trying to reach them via email for the last 6 months.

[sebastianthulin]

Hi @margolisj!

We’ve created our own fork of the repository, but we haven’t publicized it yet. This fork includes patches for issues we identified ourselves, along with the addition of some hooks. If anyone is interested in maintaining a fork, it would be greatly appreciated.

We don’t see ourselves as the right maintainers since we plan to eventually phase out Kirki due to performance concerns and its long-term compatibility with WordPress (e.g., transitioning to FSE editing in the future).

https://github.com/helsingborg-stad/kirki

[margolisj]

@sebastianthulin Awesome! I forked it in a company repo a few weeks ago then instantly got sick and haven't touched it. We at Nectarblocks, mostly me though, are very much willing to help and commit whatever we have floating around. We feel exactly the same about Kirki; in our opinion FSE isn't ready to replace traditional themes yet. If you don't feel or want to be full maintainers, we/I am happy to take it over.

A few questions:

1. Are you planning / have you release your Kirki packagist? Composer does do decently w/ git imports but it has some warts with versioning.
2. Are you okay with moving to react 18? That is by far our biggest issue with Kirki, as it stands. I have a patch somewhere that fully replaces it. Biggest issue is how bad the build system is for Kirki and not really knowing its intricacies / testing after the react 18 upgrade.
3. Would you be interesting in spinning up a Slack or Discord channel to coordinate? I'm also happy to simply move any conversations over to your fork.
4. Have you considered a hard fork vs the soft fork from the Kirki repo?3

Thanks!

[shewa12]

👋 Hi there!

Thank you for taking the time to report issues and share feedback on Kirki — it genuinely helps us improve the plugin.

We’ve just released a beta version of Kirki (v5.2.0-beta.1) that includes:

⚡ Performance improvements

📦 Plugin package size reduced from 1.1 MB to 482 KB

✅ Compatibility with WordPress 6.9

Before publishing the final stable release, we’d love feedback from volunteers who are willing to test the beta.

🔹 Beta release:
https://github.com/themeum/kirki/releases/tag/v5.2.0-beta.1

🔹 Share feedback (optional, external form):
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf21Hni5UBExrkLZj8SUkz4DMy1kxxnZUXnej8-Mxxf5_BYOw/viewform

If you have time to test and share your experience, it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks again for supporting Kirki 💙
— The Kirki Team

[margolisj]

@shewa12 Can this be used via composer?