Mara Vogel
•Jul 28, 2023
Static sites need rebuilding when content changes. It is tempting to believe your CMS provides that capability. It almost certainly does not — it provides a button, and the button posts to a URL.
Blog Post about Architecture
How the pieces fit together: content models, data ownership, and the boundaries between a CMS, a build step, and the site itself.
Why this section exists
Most architectural decisions in a small system are not about scale. They are about who owns a piece of data, how many places know its shape, and what happens when one of those places changes.
The posts here work through those questions on real systems rather than in the abstract. Where a decision turned out to be wrong, that is written down too.
Recurring themes
- Where content should live, and what it costs to move it later
- Referential integrity, and the guarantees you lose when a reference is a string
- Build-time versus save-time validation, and who each one protects
- The difference between using a framework and fighting one