Armand­Philippot.com

I already had a blog on another domain name, but I wanted a new site that would serve as a gateway to my different profiles. A site a little more “professional” than my blog.

I used to build my new sites with WordPress, so I continued on that path. However, for such a basic need, rather than creating my own theme, I decided to use a ready-made one.

I didn’t want to maintain two different domain names anymore, so I closed my old blog and I integrated a blog section into ArmandPhilippot.com. This time, I went with a homemade WordPress theme. The contents of the site were always “professional” oriented, being exclusively oriented towards the web: writing, integration and SEO.

I wanted a more personal site. So I built a new WordPress theme to meet my needs. The blog topics diversified and I integrated other types of content like a list of sites that interested me or that I supported financially.

The contents remained pretty much the same as the previous version; I just wanted a graphic refresh. So I created a new WordPress theme for my site.

I did a new redesign, quite minimalist. I mainly took advantage of it to reorganize my content.

This redesign was also an opportunity to integrate new tools into my WordPress theme building process: Gulp to automate certain tasks and PHP Code Sniffer to improve my code.

After a graphic redesign pretty minimal, I wanted a change. For this new version, I added ACF to create custom content types. I also included new features like a button to change the theme or a search field available on all pages in the header.

This new version was also an opportunity to experiment with new tools. For example, I replaced Gulp with webpack to automate certain tasks and to optimize my assets.

I was getting more and more tired of WordPress. Gutenberg didn’t bother me that much, but WordPress became slower and slower on the back-office side. When you write long enough articles, it becomes really annoying. So I wanted to migrate to another technology to manage my content.

I wasn’t sure if Markdown would suit me, so I did it steps by steps. So, that year, I went for a slightly more advanced architecture:

• Next.js for the front-end
• WordPress as headless CMS for my blog
• MDX for some contents

Later, I migrated new content from WordPress to MDX. I was supposed to do the same with blog posts; I never did. I also stopped writing.