Hey all. I’ve been working on a tool for the last several months initially as a tool for my own work that has since evolved into something I’m planning on launching in some commercial fashion. It has genuinely evolved into a tool I use daily in my professional life.
I’ve been building websites in various flavors for almost 30 years and the platform of choice for me has almost exclusively been modx. I am constantly spinning up new sites for client work as well as rapid testing of sandbox projects. Including modx into this tools dna was a plan from day one.
If you’re like me, I have always been on the lookout for a solid local testing environment that is also full featured and easy to use. Most of the ones I have used over the years have been lacking in some areas and strong in others, but I have yet to find something that checked all my boxes. It was out of this frustration that Kiln was born.
Kiln is a local web development and design platform with a strong emphasis on speed and flexibility. While it contains all the functions of a standard wamp stack, my goal is to make it so much more than just that.
Currently I have a nearly feature complete beta Windows version as well as an Intel Mac version. I need to get a newer aMac to do testing and development on for arm64 - It’s definitely in the pipeline and one of my initial commitments to this was to have feature parity across both platforms as well as UI/UX parity.
Below is a very draft and very rough YouTube introductory video that I think will give you a good idea of what this app is capable of and where I want to go with it.
I’m looking for some individuals who may be interested in being early beta testers on Windows and Mac. Be aware that there are still rough edges and while I’d like people of all skill levels, a good understanding of what Apache MySQL, PHP, nginx development stacks are would be helpful.
In exchange for your help and feedback, I would happily give free licenses of Kiln to those who actively help me shake it down.
The website is barely up and live. I currently don’t have binaries available publicly for download but reach out to me here and as I get things set up I will communicate with those who are interested.
I would VERY MUCH like to hear your thoughts and opinions on what I present in this video in its very early stages. Do you think I am heading in the right direction with the design and feature set? Do you think this is a tool that there is a market for? Also, do you think I’m missing any obvious complimentary functionality?
Many thanks in advance. I hope posting this here is ok. You are my people 
