Starter CMS tech stack
Tech stacks can elicit opinionated conversations, and I find it interesting learning how individuals from different backgrounds solve similar problems. Sometimes its using the more appropriate tool, but other times it is using the more familiar tool.
For the custom CMS this site is hosted by, I chose a tech stack that is mostly familiar, but also one that reduces complexity. At least in the beginning. I want to focus on features and not complicated hosting and deployment strategies. Another goal was to minimize the cost of hosting.
For these reasons, the overall tech stack is listed below with my thought process
- Vanilla CSS - Writing my own CSS. This is probably not as efficient as chosing something like BootStrap, but I wanted to get back in to CSS after many years away, and this felt like an easy opportunity to learn while keeping things simple.
- Vanilla JS - Nothing terribly complicated going on, even with admin tools, so writing some basic JS is easy enough for now.
- Prism - syntax highlighter I've used and been satisfied with for years
- .NET 8 - amazing cross-platform ecosystem with a huge community and tooling
- ASP.NET MVC w/ Razor views - I'm a big fan of request/response and server-side rendered HTML.
- C# - I'm very deep into the language for most of my career. Plus...dotnet :)
- SQLite - Fast, scalable, easy database that lives right beside the app.
- Fly.io - Simple hosting. Even easier deployments from my local machine.
- CloudFlare - Certificate management
The above list will grow and change over time, but for now it works and keeps features as the main focus.