Believe it or not, but there exists a Laravel VuTales rewrite that has the majority of its static pages finished, including the blog, front page, user page in a state of near completion. The database schema is mostly laid out with model factories for everything and the ability to fill the database with dummy data for development.
However, I’m planning on abandoning the Laravel version in favour of a suite of tweaks and additions on top of WordPress instead. Thankfully most of the front end work is not going to waste – all the blade views are all being pulled apart and put back together as a bespoke WordPress theme.
But why you may ask. Well, the Laravel edition has really came unstuck when it comes to writing a backend that really has appeal. I feel that a blogging site needs to get two core things right:
It needs to have an excellent reading experience and it needs to have an excellent writing experience.
The former I think I’ve gotten down pretty well, but the latter not so much. I’m a back end developer – I don’t like doing front end things and I’m not very good at them. I was hoping that I could take an off the shelf editor (Summernote) and slap in a bit of jQuery and get an experience that is at best… reasonable.
But that’s not really what has happened. Instead I’ve poured a lot of effort into a backend that’s full of compromises and is generally feature poor.
Recently I’ve been doing a fair amount of work in WordPress, and I really like how good the writing experience is. I’ve always thought that WordPress wasn’t going to be suitable as it’s virtually always a single tenant application. But I spent really a few evenings writing an experimental plugin to turn it into a multi-tenant community like VuTales, and the results will shock you. It actually works quite well.
There is a preview of it here: wp.vutales.com
Bare in mind the content here will be deleted at some point in the future. It’s just a testing site 🙂
There’s a lot to do, and more to talk about in the future. But for now, that’s where we stand.