My blog has always been a way for me to convey my feelings about some of the developments and RND that I do during my work or even during my spare time. For a long time, I use to rely on a CMS for the blog. Initially Drupal and then for almost last two years on WordPress. But, this time I took a decision and changed the entire system into a Laravel application. In this post, I am going to share my reason for some of the decision that I took and some of my views which made me take those decisions.

Why Laravel?

The reasons which I had were something which can be done in both the CMS. Technically there is no reason a developer cannot achieve those things within those platforms. But, recently I have been doing so many projects on Laravel and it's superb features. I wanted to have a test-driven development process, some widgets done in Vue.js and most importantly a small admin section where I would do a little more than content management. Things like expense tracking, photo management with SES and a few more ideas. And these, I was not willing to develop inside any of the two CMSes.

Porting of content

The first challenge was porting the content. When I had migrated from Drupal to Wordpress, I had to redo the entire articles. Initially, the count was less than 50 and so I didn't mind doing those again (and yes, I did drop some of the articles which I felt were not much relevant anymore and doesn't drive too much traffic also). But, many of the content had some custom functionalities in Drupal which I had done custom and cannot be ported to Wordpress. So, I simplified and used Wordpress for a long time. My count went up from 50 to about 110 in about 1.5 to 2 years I guess because I enjoyed the ease of creating content using the Wordpress interface.

But now in the Laravel application again I had to port the content and I was thinking what can be a smart approach which will help me create content easily. Have the option to move to a different framework/platform later if I choose to (it's my blog, I am the client right.. so I decide when to refactor) and I choose Markdown. Yes, write the article in Markdown solves two problems for me - one is that I can port content to some other platform easily. I just need to find the correct parser to change form Markdown to HTML and I am done. Second, I don't have to create a content creating section. Now, I am writing the content inside Visual Studio Code with Markdown preview plugin; check spellings and save that file into the database as it is.

Plus, my Wordpress was complaining about pending updates at such short interval of time. It's my blog, I hardly find time to write articles, and now I need to spend time on updating it as well and that too at such short interval of time? It's a matter of security.

So yes, in just about three days (after my office hours) I was able to get the entire Laravel site ready along with the front end theme and the back-end logic to take the Markdown content from the database and render it and show the articles. And even before going live, I experiment a bit and refactored the front end and switched to Tailwind CSS from Bootstrap 4. May not have been the best implementation, but I now have the flexibility to play around with it.

The only item which took time was - porting the content from Wordpress articles to Markdown files. Yeah, a bit boring and tedious (plus I had to spent almost half of my Saturday and Sunday porting the content) but for a greater cause - to give me flexibility.

Future plans

I already have plans to put some functionalities on the blog as soon as I find the time. The sidebar is blank, staring at me looking for content. I will add that search - using Algolia search like how Laravel docs give that fast search with the cool interface. A newsletter subscribes widget with some integration with Mailchimp maybe (I don't care if I don't get too many subscribers), comments along with some Spam protection and a few more too.

Overall, I am happy with the migration and looking forward to experimenting a bit with my current site.