This post is part of a series where I'm hoping to prove to myself that building a dynamic website with NodeJS is much more fun than using a CMS platform. See the first post for an explanation of why
The code can be found on GitHub
Previous Post I've been banging this drum into the internet's echo chamber for five months now and enough is enough!
My initial to-do list was to build a site that:
- Displays Web pages
- Stores data
- Edits web pages / Has an Admin section
- Has templating
- Allows more than one author
- Has Server side caching
- does anything not have server side caching these days?! ExpressJS does…
- Can be used by someone non-technical
- totally subjective… I think this could be used by just-about-anyone but it would need polish and user-testing to really determine that.
Aims
No heavy frameworks need apply
My initial aim was to prove to myself that there's a lot of friction using a big framework like Django when building a CMS site and that can be avoided. I still feel that's true and I haven't discovered anything in this process that changes my mind (yeah, confirmation bias).
- Implementing login was a pain - but it always is…
- I switched backwards and forwards between view engines as I came to terms with express
This series of posts has 12 instalments. Each of which represents around 4 hours of work including typing up the posts so turning out a fairly straight-forward business website in 10 actual days would be gigantically achievable.
That doesn't mean you can't make websites with a big framework or even that you shouldn't… it does mean I won't and I hope it helps demonstrate why…
NodeJS is super fun, development, for the purposes of
I've learnt an amazing amount. I'd meant to explore Selenium, Browserstack, Promises, and contenteditable for ages - this series was the push to do that.
And, yes, Node is great to work with. My Node style isn't there yet but this has helped bring me closer to writing Node code I'm happy with.
Killing the series
But I'm a bit bored with this now and I've got more children than when I started the series. It feels like a drag and an obligation to carry on which definitely isn't why I'm blogging (that's because I don't have any real hobbies any more).
So I'm stopping here…