CMS & web frameworks

2024-10-05T19:55:56

i have a lot of thoughts and opinions about both of these things that i’ll start to accumulate here. to begin with here are brief thoughts on a few approaches you can take to making and managing websites:

• nextjs – new kid on the block. pretty cool honestly, i’m using it for this website. but it’s quite complicated and even still, a little lacking when you compare it to something like WP or laravel from the php world. verdict is out on this one for me, i wouldn’t discourage it but i’d strongly encourage trying other things as well
• wordpress – the mackdaddy, my original “love”, it got me into web development in a serious way and is imo a pinnacle of what community software can be and do. in many ways, it is hot garbage, but its some of the best hot garbage out of there and it really does empower small businesses and new devs in a way that jaded devs have a hard time relating to. in some drama recently with wp engine, we’ll see how that shakes out. use wordpress it rules. in fact this blog post is actually written in wordpress, i use it as a CMS for my nextjs website, just to make life more complicated! truly it has some benefits but plenty is written already just look up “headless wp”
• laravel – rarely used this but it really seems like the way to go for any ‘serious’ php dev. every language should aspire to have a framework like laravel
• tina – really cool, edit in place and save to git, but i rarely actually use it, need to give it another try. might convert the wp cms to tina
• markdown – the king, truly. just write all your notes and articles in markdown and save them in your repo, or host them elsewhere. markdown takes like 5 minutes to learn and it’s everywhere, learn it!
• jekyll/11ty/hugo – static website builders are really sick and fun to play with, but at this point the major frameworks like nextjs are also capable of static export so these have lost a lot of their luster for me. 11ty is still cool if you want to go nearly barebones. you can learn a lot using these.
• html – nearly as great as markdown imo – just write in friggin html! how hard is that? <b>not hard</b>! it’s just a little more boilerplatey than markdown. that’s why you just write html in your markdown when and where its needed
• htmx – have not used this but must say it looks 100% up my alley and has a great mindset
• shopify – if you’re selling shit and you don’t want to think about web stuff, this is a slightly expensive but very good solution. i was a hater at first but they won me over with liquid which I still sometimes use in projects today

my advice in a nutshell

start as simple as possible. probably html or markdown. then if that’s restrictive, start static building with next, or set up a wordpress or shopify site if you plan to sell anything. if your entire purpose is a blog and you want to do some nice formatting or host your own images, maybe try starting with wordpress or tina to begin with