It is 2020, the HCI course just started. We have the assignment of documenting our course jouney on a portfolio website.
Sure, putting content on a website can be achieved by using popular CMS systems such as WordPress, Joomla or Drupal in the earlier days. I am looking back to a stack of WordPress websites I built from 2014 to 2020.
But there are tons of new web standards out there - Isn't WordPress a bit overkill for the assignment?
I said no - not WordPress again this time. Nor did I want to either recycle one of my old portfolios built from scratch in HTML + CSS or build another one from scratch just to run through the same process yet another time.
What I was looking for was a steep learning curve in using state of the art web technologies such as PWAs (Progressive Web Apps) and JavaScript to exchange content without reloading the entire page, cache elements offline for faster loading etc.
Some friends are using WIX to build their websites. In German "wix / wichs(en)" describes the act of male masturbation. I see a parallel line in that, as pages can be created quick and dirty - but are not really customisable. Some other friends use already more advanced tools like WebFlow. But whatever tool they might be using - I would rather call them platforms. Platforms run by companies with interests, customer lock-in. And this is, for a person like me who strives for independence and decentralisation, of course, rather dangerous or at least undesirable :D
Leaving a platform after so many years and opening up for different approaches is certainly not easy, but i wanted to do stay ahead in the game. After studying a while about flat-file CMS systems such as Grav or Bludit, which I have been using for a different project already, I concluded that they are just like WordPress - with the difference they do not require a Database.
How do people build blogs in 2020?
During my research one thing in particular popped to my eyes: The market of CMSs is very cluttered but at the same time, platforms like WebFlow are trying to lock customers in.
However, there are big companies using different CMS systems simultaneously as migration processes from CMS to CMS are not always that smooth.
But how do they manage to put all these CMS systems under one roof? I found my personal answer in GatsbyJS. With GatsbyJS you can basically source content from different CMS systems and tell gatsby how to make it look like after all.
There are different options to source content with GatsbyJS - there are headless CMS systems like Ghost, Contentful - but it is even possible to get content from WordPress.