David Dyess IIWell, now that I have your attention… haha. I have been extremely busy the past few months. Unfortunately, I was forced to live on base at Kirtland AFB for most of March, all of April, and a couple of days into May. For some reason those 45ish days were so slow and grueling, I don’t remember very much of the year before that happened. It’s odd.
I’ve built quite a bit the last ~2 months and a lot it will be coming to life soon, in various forms. I previously talked about building a headless CMS, as a potential replacement for my Clay CMS. I haven’t completely done it yet, but it’s well on its way. I’ve really gone all-in for Node.js, React, and NoSQL. I’ve completely replicated what is currently on profoundgrace.org and made it a lot better. I’ve also developed quite a tool kit for my database of choice and my REST framework talking to it.
I still haven’t decided if or when I may move this site to the new platform. I think that may be partially why I wasn’t writing and building onto this site as much. I’m going to try to come back here a little more often. WordPress isn’t that bad, I just hate almost everything about it (haha). I will likely wait until my platform is more mature, which may not be that long. Forget that, I will definitely be moving to it one day, just not until it’s ready.
I’m hoping to relaunch profoundgrace.org this weekend or perhaps next week. I probably could have launched a direct replacement last weekend, but instead kept building onto it. I’m trying to avoid having to strip anything out of it to get it stable, but I do at least have a roadmap and there aren’t a lot of pieces left in the current milestone.
One of the advantages this time is I’m not building an everything for everyone, so my approach this time around is more achievable. Clay CMS was too big of a task for one person, hence the reason it took 10 years for me to stop working on it. Another advantage is I have a different perspective: I haven’t simply built modules or plugins for a CMS, I’ve built an entire CMS with the modules, plugins, roles, hooks, template engine, etc. These have helped guide me in designing and structuring with balance and purpose, while also innovating.
When I decided it was time to move on from Clay, part of me was worried I’d just recreate Clay in a different form. I’m very pleased with my choices, though, and I’m already as proud of my new platform as I ever was of Clay (at this point in development). Clay is like one of my children, that’s how long I spent building and rebuilding and refining it. I can’t regret what I learned from it. All I can do it take that into making my next great CMS.