My company's blog that had been left without updating for many years has been renewed. Although the past version of the blog was consisted with wordpress, I had been bored with it and wanted to use advanced technology such like headless CMS and static site generator, so I decided to rebuild the blog half a year ago. Finally I completed it during the 10 days Golden Week.
This time, I'll briefly show you what kind of tool or framework I used for it.
Headless CMS
Wordpress, the most widely used CMS, is increasingly used as an API server using wp-json. However, there are more useful and light-weight CMS rather than using wordpress in term of API oriented development. It is called Headless CMS or Decoupled CMS because only output data string written in JSON, and has no view.
Although there are many types already, there is no de fact standard yet as of now, so I wondered which system I should use. Anyway, I tried using Strapi that is completely open source and has most stars at Github.
Static Site Generator
Next what we should think about is how to implement the frontend. There are some ways that using react.js, vue.js to work as SPA. In terms of developing blogs, it need to consider about SEO and sharing to SNS, so I should add functions of Server Side Rendering. On the other hand, using Static site generator can be satisfied with all such problems.
As its name suggests, Static site generator generates static files including html, css, javascript and images. All datas used for generation are fetched from CMS, and the generator converts datas into static files. These files are all we need to deploy as production code. One of its pros is that all generated files are static so it works on only browser. That means it isn't need server side processing at all.
This time, I used Gatsby that is increasing to use among frontend developers because there is a tutorial that is to study usage of Strapi with Gatsby, it seems easy to develop.
Start Building!
After selecting frameworks, started building the blog by using such advanced technology. But due to my lack of knowledge, it took me half a year to finish building. All in all, I think Wordpress is very useful to operate multi-language and image compression, but I feel that building blog with headless CMS and Static site generator has large possibility. On another post, I will show you how I built this blog. For engineers, like me, who are bored with Wordpress.