Topic updated: 2022-05-26
Introducing JAW (Just-A-Word), an open-source headless blog CMS.
My blog is eleven years old. During the first years, I changed 3 or 4 times of framework, for the fun. It started with vanilla PHP, then a custom PHP framework, then again, and finally Zend Framework 2, in 2014, when this framework was still a thing. Since then, I did not change anything. I tried in 2018 to completely rebuild it with Node.js and Express.js, but when it was almost finished, I had to stop because of lack of time.
Two years later during the pandemic this idea went back : Express.js with Vue.js for the rendering. This time the same culprit stopped me even before starting the actual work: the time, again. I did not have it, and I was lazy to rebuild all the dabatase layer to extract the data.
Then, in 2021, still frustrated to have this outdated stack for my blog, I decided to start with another approach, given the following:
At my job we started to use some headless CMS for e-commerce. They are nice solutions, but:
So I developed my own custom solution (I am a developer, I like using my stuff), named JAW (Just A Word).
The idea here is to be able to easily keep a CMS with the latest PHP standards (or almost, because for instance I have some personal issues with Doctrine :P ), while having to do minimal work each time I want to have a new design for my blog or using new things without having to worry to rebuild the whole CMS.
The JAW code is available here. It is open-source, has documentation, and while there is still a lot of features to implement, I already use it for my blog. Now I need to find some time to rebuild the front with something new :)