As a developer I believe that you’ve to have the magpie gene activated when it comes to personal projects. Learning new technologies that change the way things work around businesses, is an evergreen process for any developer. Sure, you can pick, and choose which technologies you’d like to invest your future in. But, the fact still remains that technology keeps changing; that it’s evolution is as fast as a loose cheetah in the Amazon hunting its prey.
Keeping track of all new technologies, and development stacks all the time, while sticking to what you’re used to at work, is tough. This is where personal projects shine, and stick out by affording you a playground of sorts to learn, and hone new skills with respect to developing, and writing code.
One of the best ways to keep up to date, is to dive into open source projects that you care about. You can contribute by helping to clear out those issues, and tickets; all the time learning to work with other devs, and improving your coding skills in the process. Another way to learn new stuff is to take up a side project, like learning how to develop, use, configure open source software that work on a different stack of technologies than what you’re used to.
Open source CMSs are one of these playgrounds for me, to learn, improve, and pick up new skills. I’ve dabbled in, and have had fun with some of the more popular crowd, like Joomla, WP, Magento, Ghost, etc. And now there’s another new kid on the block, built on top of emerging technologies, which I might add are like shiny new diamonds to developers — well, because they’re new.
While other CMSs like WordPress are playing catchup with these new emerging technologies, CMSs that are being built around these from the ground-up will always have my vote first. Well, because something like WordPress (Read about calypso yet?) will always need to be migrated to these newer stacks, making it difficult to be able to let go of all that baggage worth of ten or more years in the making. Ultimately, for something like WordPress to upgrade it’s fronted, and it’s core, is time-consuming, and may lead to lags, and all sorts of issues later-down-the-road. It will take sometime for them to catchup to new CMSs that are being built with these technologies, from scratch; built on top of them from the ground up.
Enter Relax - A Promisingly New CMS.
I stumbled onto a new, promising OSCMS built on top of React, and Node.js - aptly titled Relax. Relax is a new generation of CMS, which aims to build faster, and better websites.
Relax isn’t ready for production use, yet. It isn’t even out in beta yet. But, it does look promising! Don’t take my word for it, here’s the demo (user: demo, pass: demo). Do note, that the demo is outdated. If you like the demo, I would suggest cloning the master branch (not stable yet), and taking it for a spin locally too!
The speed may have been exaggerated here. But, it's fast. Do note that the demo is outdated.
It’s brutally fast, and feels light. It does look promising! Did I mention that it is fast!
Note: The demo is outdated. Try cloning the master, and taking it for a spin locally for a better feel of it.
