Category
Modern web development practices, tools, and frameworks
125 posts
A developer-focused comparison of 7 Wix alternatives — UnfoldCMS, WordPress, Webflow, Astro, Ghost, Framer, and Next.js — scored on code access, data export, hosting control, and performance headroom.
Teams leave Webflow over pricing, CMS item limits, and lock-in. We compare 7 alternatives — UnfoldCMS, WordPress, Ghost, Framer, Astro + headless, Squarespace, Statamic — on the four things that matter.
llms.txt is a proposed markdown index at your site root that tells AI systems which pages matter. This post covers the llmstxt.org spec, llms.txt vs llms-full.txt, the unproven-adoption debate, and how UnfoldCMS auto-generates both files.
A developer's guide to CMS webhooks: why headless front-ends go stale without rebuild triggers, how to verify HMAC-SHA256 signatures in Node, and the deploy-hook, cache-purge, and search-reindex patterns that keep static sites fresh.
Ten tactical shadcn/ui patterns that survived 12 months and 205 admin pages in production. Form schemas, DataTable columns as data, theme switching via CSS variables, Sheet+Dialog composition, server-side state, variant discipline, type-safe URLs, server-action pattern. Copy-pasteable, real code.
shadcn ships 6-7 releases per month. Our CMS runs 51 components, 18 modified. The bi-weekly audit workflow that keeps our fork in sync with upstream without breaking — pin commits, track modifications, audit cadence, when to fork hard.
Two years and 205 admin pages later: why shadcn/ui beat Radix Themes for a production CMS admin. The comparison most blog posts get wrong, the trade-offs we hit, when Radix Themes is the better pick.
Markdown stacks (Docusaurus, Astro Starlight, Nextra) vs CMS stacks (Mintlify, GitBook, ReadMe). The deciding question for 2026 docs tooling is not features — it is who edits. Dev-only teams pick markdown. Teams with non-dev editors pick CMS. Real pricing, real trade-offs.
The hosting picker for headless CMS front-ends in 2026. Cloudflare Pages now wins on cost (unlimited bandwidth all tiers), Vercel still wins on Next.js DX (with a commercial-use ban on Hobby), Netlify got more expensive after April. Edge function performance compared, when each one fits.
Step-by-step tutorial: Astro 5 + UnfoldCMS via the Content Layer API. Type-safe build-time fetching, Cloudflare Pages free-tier deploy, 90% less JavaScript than the Next.js equivalent. 30 minutes from git clone to live.
UnfoldCMS ships three production themes from one codebase via Tailwind v4 CSS variables. No build per theme, no duplicated components. Adding a fourth theme is one file. Architecture, migration cost, what doesn't theme well.
Vendor widget APIs limit what you can change in a CMS admin. A shadcn-based admin lets you fork any file and modify it like any code in your repo. Why fork-and-modify wins over 12 months, and where vendor widgets are still the right pick.