Choosing a New System for a Personal Website

Over the past few months, I have worked on personal apps in Laravel, developing an automatic posting system from Telegram and a semi-automatic photo-posting service that uses Creative Commons images from Flickr to various social networks. I plan on discussing these projects in separate articles soon.

This made me want to renew my website using a Laravel-based stack. My website hasn’t seen much change since I built it a decade ago using Joomla ZOO CCK. I got everything I wanted out of it, but the site stayed a pain to manage and update. Given the technological advances, having such a dated personal website is almost embarrassing, not to mention the language of the content.

However, due to time constraints and personal preferences, I’m not inclined to build a website from scratch on a new framework. I initially considered Winter CMS, but it didn’t suit my needs after getting to know it through videos and documentation. The ideal system for me is easy to install and maintain. I don’t wish to spend time remembering complex update procedures, which I will forget after six months.

In the past, I have also worked on a personal project using Drupal that required understanding the whole system and was complex to update. I attempted a standard update, which resulted in hours of troubleshooting and fixing, something I do daily at the job and wish to avoid in my free time when I aim to create new things and relax.

An episode of the phpUgly podcast piqued my interest in Twill CMS, and after some research, I found several Reddit recommendations for Filament. The extensive documentation and a pair of Laracast courses on Filament caught my attention.

I have subscribed to Laracast since last November and have completed both Filament courses. Filament ships with lots of ready-made components for building web apps. It’s a hybrid of a framework and a CMS, which is beneficial as I intend to incorporate some unconventional elements into my website. These additions would mean a lot of tweaking on an off-the-shelf CMS. I can build these from scratch using Filament while saving me from having to program standard components.

In the coming days, I will start developing my website on Filament and try to share my progress. In the meantime, I need to familiarize myself with the TALL stack that Filament is using. This made me realize I may have missed many technological developments in recent years while focusing on improving my soft skills, leadership, and management.