A new blog layout, a new engine
This article is a bit older and might be outdated.
New blog same old bla bla
We have a new blog layout. It's streamlined with the rest of our new identity. I hope you like it.
WordPress is not for modern devs
Well, WordPress is very very hackable. You can do almost everything with it. And whatever you need: it has been done, documented and open-sourced before. Wordpress is feature-rich and extensible. The WordPress admin is perfect for non techies (speak clients).
We want: Markdown, version control, minimalism and edginess.
Evaluating alternatives
Obviously i was interested in a modern Laravel blogging engine. I tried out OctoberCMS and Wardrobe. While they are great — my playfulness wasn't satisfied yet.
Static site generators
So i digged into static site generators — those systems that spit out a bunch of HTML pages. Of course I first checked out the PHP ones Sculpin and Phrozn. Then i moved on to Node.js generators as I already use Gulp.
I finally settled with Metalsmith. It's not newest hippest technology — but ok for me.
Learnings
- Write cleaner code!
- Open source code for pull requests
- Gulp & Metalsmith live side by side — not good
- Generation is quick, but an additional step
- Reinvent the wheel for all details (RSS, 404 …)
- Exclude "build" from Git
- Figure out a deployment process to fortrabbit