I’m building a new content management system.
Yes, you heard that right. What started out as sort of a crazy idea I had while driving to the Great Smoky Mountains last fall is starting to turn into a real thing.
With WordPress perpetually in flux as long as Matt Mullenweg is around, I’ve been looking for other CMS options, and, to be honest, I haven’t exactly found what I feel is the best fit.
So what better time to try and create something that works for you than the present.
I’m under no impression that this is going to be easy. And it’s going to take a long while to actually be a thing that others can use. But I love a challenge, and, at the very least, I’ll become a much better web developer and programmer on the other side.
So, here’s Digital Shopfront CMS.
What is Digital Shopfront?
So first off, what is Digital Shopfront?
To put it simply, Digital Shopfront will be a content management system that’s built specifically for small businesses. Every back end and front end decision is based on what would create the best tool for a small business owner that just wants to build and manage a website right from their dashboard.
There will be a visual editor for both content and the site design to allow a user to customize their website without needing any code. While it will certainly have inspiration from the full site editing tools of WordPress (since that’s what I’ve used a lot in the last couple of years), I’m hoping to not make the same mistakes that were made with the Gutenberg project (i.e. better user experience, better accessibility, better performance, etc.).
And there will eventually be a number of extensions to allow those small business website owners to add whatever they want and need for their website.
On the technical side, it’s going to be built with the TALL stack — Tailwind, Alpine, Laravel and Livewire — although the styling on the front end of the website will likely use a custom style engine.
In short, the focus is on helping give small businesses, hobbyists and artists a tool to help them in today’s online world. Whether it’s selling online, generating leads, creating a community or anything else, my goal is to give them the tools to help them succeed.
Why Build a New CMS?
So why would I build a new content management system when there are so many out there to choose from?
Well, the short answer is because I want to.
The longer answer is because I think there is a lot of value in creating something from the ground up in a way that you want to.
I’ve been using WordPress for a long time now, but it’s still a blogging platform. Yes, there are plenty of tools that allow you to create any type of website that you want and I’ve used a lot of them to create many different website types. But under the hood, it’s still a CMS built for blogging.
And with the way WordPress is going at the moment, it was time for me to look elsewhere, and I haven’t come across anything that quite works for what I want to do. Yes, I can be quite picky when it comes to my web tools.
So create a content management system it is.
I also think it’s going to be a great way to become a better web designer and developer because I’m going to have to learn a ton of new things. Even if Digital Shopfront eventually fails, at least I’ll have the knowledge and tools to take another job if need be.
And based on early personal results, I’m having more fun with web development again. I’m learning and tinkering, which is how and why I got into web dev in the first place.
So yeah, I just want to create a new content management system.
Planned Features for Digital Shopfront
For those who might be curious, here’s a list of planned features for Digital Shopfront. Ideally, I’ll have a lot of these in place for the public release.
- Visual Editor
- Ecommerce
- Blogging
- Analytics
- Lead Generation and CRM
- Integrations
- Managed Hosting
I’ll talk about each of these more as I start to build out the features down the road.
Sneak Peak of Admin Designs
Now for the fun part of this blog post: the admin designs.
I will say that a lot of these are essentially fancy wireframes to help me put what I have in my head down onto the screen. As I actually build these out in code, they’ll get more fleshed out and more looking like an actual CMS.
So the final product probably (hopefully) won’t look exactly like this, but it will be close-ish.
Timeline for Digital Shopfront
So what’s the timeframe for building and launching Digital Shopfront?
Well, to be honest, I don’t know.
As of right now, I’m working on the backend of it first to get that situated. Really, the first phase of this project is to essentially get a proof of concept for myself with the bare minimum features needed for a CMS: a dashboard area, posts, pages, media, users, settings and a visual editor.
From there I’ll be polishing it up and adding on new features. And I’ll be first beta testing it with my personal websites before opening it up for public testing and then the eventual full release.
But that’s going to take a lot of time. If I’m using it on my personal websites by the end of this year, I see that as an absolute win.
In the meantime, you can stay updated about the project by subscribing to my YouTube channel. I plan on posting update videos every other Friday. And of course, I’ll be talking about it here on the blog.
