In my opinion you are looking for a new CMS, can I suggest Craft CMS? It is Laravel / PHP based, very simple to use for both programmers and clients.

You do not need to write PHP to use the framework, much of the work is done building data structures in the dashboard, and outputting using simple template tags called "Twig".

It is React / Vue ready, although they are not really necessary. You might want to look at some static site generators such as Jekyll or Statamic also.

I sort of just accept that I have to go with the current. Just like you said you are doing I bit the bullet recently and have been exclusively building my sites/apps with GatsbyJS and NetlifyCMS. I am also using Netlify to host my properties and I am enjoying it a bit more than when I was building sites on unmanaged virtual private servers running CentOS using free WordPress themes. Those days aren't that far behind me but it seems like it was so long ago due to the technology moving so quickly. I believe that this sort of thing is here to stay and that we have to be comfortable with constantly learning new things or we will definitely become obsolete. I hope that you find your way back and settle into a stack that you really enjoy. On a slightly different tip I have been slowly learning to program in Go and you can do some awesome web development using the standard Go libraries, so perhaps that could be a salvation. I feel you though, and at this point I can only go with the flow and hope for the best.

Questioning your tech stack is a healthy exercise to do, i switched tech stacks over 5 times already and i'm getting closer and closer to a stack that aligns with what i want it to be, some of those things i'm building myself since they don't exist.

It's hard to get something that ticks all the boxes, must be easy to maintain, must be performing well, must be easy to train new devs in, must allow rapid development, must allow code sharing between different platforms, should assist to reduce as much errors up-front rather than at runtime, should allow for easy translation between business requirements and what developers do with it, etc. (This is a portion of my checklist).

I too am trying to find a way to stay as close to the real thing as possible without sacrificing development speed, so i'm building my own ecosystem to do exactly that. Who knows, maybe my ecosystem will become exactly what React and Angular already are, at least i get to go through the Journey that will make me understand these frameworks / ecosystems better.

Good luck on your journey!

I guess you are overthinking, will keep it small until there is internet on planet there will be websites. Javascript is most used language for a reason because its everywhere from web-apps , mobile-apps , server-side to IOT and machine learning too.

Yes it's true Javascript is Costly but many great developers are working on it to make it more faster and I am sure this year Google IO we will hear about it.

For your use case you may want to use Publii - A CMS for static site generator.

That way your clients have a GUI editor to update content, and you get the security & performance of a static site.

I do agree that less readability is the major downside of WebAssembly, which I think will be a big part of the future web.

But on the other hand, what is the last time you tried to read minified Javascript? It's been unreadable for a while...

I can agree about the bloat and the useless computations. Although you can build easy isomorphic apps by just using

• developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/web-compon…

and you can combine it with:

• developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/--*

this is at least how I would do it these days. The react / etc eco system are tackling problems way out of scope for the normal person

for bigger teams it's just a review / convention cycle that's actually needed and maybe prettier / typescript (I would use typescript but that's taste)

the question of source and abstraction is a different ones. These days the industry dominates the ideas they want 'more' all the time this is why we don't educate our developers anymore we push the through the meat grinder and slap fancy terms on things.

I can go on about on how many levels we are doing the wrong things but that's just my opinion and they are in flux since I reflect regularly on them.

I think we tend to over engineere things for engineering sake. Sometime going back to the basics on a natural evolved system makes things a lot more understandable and easier than using those 'complex' structures with transpilers, pipeline, plugins, super sets .... etc.

Our customer service and time to market overshadow that we're wasting energy on a scale that does not reek the benefits so often claimed by the agents of the technologies. ... in other word using react/vue/any dynamic frontend lib for a static page should not be seen as good outside of experimentation.

Anyhow ... I ramble ... I hope that the declarative model with enhancements comes back and we slowly can go back to a 'normal' web.

Although I am a professional so I understand why it happens and I use react and other frameworks in my daily life.... I still don't have to like it :)

I think we do overthink at some stage but at the same time it can be productive, when I realised what I could do with WordPress I dropped it like a bomb and choose to chase the full stack by taking on the MEAN stack...

Less to say, It didn't take too well for me, but then someone suggested I learnt Python which again my stack has changed to Python + Django now.. Since then I've now been able to read and understand JavaScript a lot more easier and its also opened the doors to PHP..

Even though there's all these easy bits now online that make developing much faster, I still prefer vanilla any day even to the point i'm developing my own CMS in Python, Django, HTML, CSS and yes its taking me quite a while to do it, also without using bootstrap or a similar framework.

Yes it would be nice if we could create a simple cms in html but I do think that it would be very insecure in certain ways ;) As my doc would say try not to think about the future of the web, yes its fast changing but as long as you're confident in what you want to do you'll be fine :)

My weird speciality seems to be CMS's apparently..