jaze.dev Devlog #01 - Planning My Blog CMS

Hi There!

The time has finally come for me to transform my website into something more; something that I've been wanting to do for some time and I'll be documenting the journey and the steps I take.

Now; let's dive in 👇

The Vision for jaze.dev v2

Funnily enough, this was my original plan for my website many years ago, but I changed track to focusing on other things rather than building my own little CMS platform.

But the vision is to have my own platform, where I can easily and conveniently write posts, plan and track my content, have OOTB (Out of the box) integrations for features I want and finally to build a small community of people who share the same interests as me.

All in one place, here on jaze.dev.

Features

Now to reveal the exact feature list, things that I'd love to have in a single platform, out of the box:

• Email subscribers
  • Notify users when new posts are published (via toggle on CMS Post page)
  • Sub and Unsub functionality
• Email template functionality
  • Create; edit and save dynamic auto-populated templates that can be sent to my subscribers - all from the UI.
  • Ability to generate test emails and select test recipients.
• CMS functionality
  • Ability to create; edit and publish/unpublish posts with versioning to never loose any content I write.
  • Block style editor (like Notion) for the actual writing of posts that can insert and configure custom vue components.
  • Ability to plan content and create a content schedule / pipeline.
  • Automatic image uploads and search when inserting into a Post.
• Search Engine Integration
  • Register a search engine provider via the UI (ex. google console).
  • Automatically notify all active and registered search engine providers when posts are published / updated.
• AD Service Integration
  • Register an ad service provider via the UI (ex. google adsense)
  • Activate the ad provider to display ads automatically on the posts via a special ad component.
• Email Service Provider Integration
  • Ability to register email service providers that the system can use to send emails (ex. gmail)
• 2FA Authentication
  • Ability to setup 2FA on any accounts registered on the jaze.dev system.
• Admin Panel
  • This is where all of the configuration for the above will live on the UI.

I think that's it for now, before I get too carried away and this list never ends 🔥📋

Architecture

Now that I've shared the feature requirements, it's important to figure out how the puzzle will fit together. Luckily I've already done that.

We will be using the following services:

• Nginx as a reverse proxy
• Nuxt frontend (server container with SSR for SEO)
• Dotnet API backend (this is where the logic lives)
• PostgreSQL database
• Podman for containerization

What are the different pieces in the diagram above?

jaze.dev Frontend (Nuxt SRR)

The frontend (UI) for jaze.dev is already developed using nuxt and I enjoy working with vue as well as nuxt.

Initially; when the user connects to my website the nuxt server container will render the content and send it to the user, once received by the user it will be hydrated (SPA logic activates) and then its the same as a normal SPA app.

From there onwards everything will happen in the browser and further pages the user navigates to won't be rendered server side.

The reason I include SSR is for SEO, when google or any other search engine scrapes my website they don't always execute javascript which is required for SPA's to work.

jaze.dev API (Dotnet)

This is the backend of my website and where all the magic happens.

This API will be responsible for delivering posts, serving content etc.. and will make use of PostgreSQL as the database to persist all of this.

The Plan

I won't be building and releasing everything in one go, my plan is to do a feature based released until I've completed all the features above.

And while I'm working on those features, I'll still be writing posts in between.

Currently, off the top of my head, the most important pieces of functionality to developed first would be:

1. Admin Panel (build API's on jaze.dev API as needed)
2. Email subscriber functionality (Sub & Unsub)
3. Email notifications functionality (new post released etc..)
4. CMS functionality - this is the big one so I will also break it up and release it in pieces for myself as needed.

I can't wait to get to the point where this is no longer theoretical or just planning, but where I can start releasing small videos of features I've built and the progress I've made!!

Why I am I doing building this?

A little while ago, I started looking at other blogging platforms for convenience when it comes to posting and writing my content, however all the platforms I looked at didn't support different features that I wanted, some of those features aren't on the list above.

Why are they not on the list? - Well, it's because I'm only focusing on phase 1 of this project now, but what happens afterwards?

Projects as time goes on, they continue to evolve along with their requirements and I can forsee that after phase 1, those platforms won't support my evolving requirements for jaze.dev.

Another point, I'm a developer and this is a little side project of mine and I love to build things, so why not build it myself piece by piece?

I think one of the best feelings in the world; is building your own piece of software that you actively use most days that makes your life better, so that's what I'm doing and what I'm looking forward to once phase 1 is done.

But I think that's it for now, if you got this far - thanks for reading and I'm looking forward to sharing the progress updates with you as well as the other things I'm planning on writing about 😊