After 9 years of inactivity (2012-2021) I have decided to give Fervoare CMS (“enthusiasm” in Romanian) a new home on GitHub. You can also check it out on Softpedia.
Built on top of this tiny little PHP framework I wrote a year earlier called OctoMS, the CMS has a surprisingly lean learning curve – due in part to its tiny feature set.
In a modern world of feature-rich content management systems (such as WordPress, the one I’m using to write this article) with millions of hours of dev time, Fervoare CMS seems antiquated and pointless. However, it has a very light MVC architecture similar to that of CodeIgniter so if you’d like to see how web dev looked a decade ago, this CMS is a nice little 15-minute read.
The experience of writing a PHP framework and a CMS from scratch is one of the best learning tools I can think of. It’s one thing to read the documentation and use a framework written by other people and another, deeply humbling and rewarding experience to “reinvent the wheel”.
If you’re learning JavaScript today my advice to you is, don’t just use React, write your own version from the ground up.
It will be 10x harder, sure, and your version will definitely lag behind in all aspects (see the CMS above) but you’ll be a better software developer because of it.
Thank you for reading and remember to have fun!
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
Ralph Waldo Emerson