Hi, I’m a Software Enginner looking to create a personal tech blog.
TL;DR: I want to create a personal tech blog but not sure if I should code it to impress recruiter/interviewers or go with WordPress because it is easy/cheap to setup.
This blog isn’t meant to attract audience (although audiences are welcome to read and comment) but it is primarily for myself to record my tech journey and to become a better writer.
As a Sofware Engineer, I have an itch to code everything although I know I should not but it helps me to put a project on my portfolio and posssibly to get hired in tech companies.
I have looked into Strapi A headless CMS, I can make a React + Strapi Project however deploying this would cost me way too much.
WordPress on the other hand is far cheap and easy to setup but it is also no-code/low-code approach and I’m not sure if having a wordpress blog on my portfolio would help me get a job at a big tech company as a Software Engineer than coding a blog from scratch.
I already have a portfolio site (in React.js) and I want to match the look and feel of my portfolio site to the blog site.
Both portfolio and blog should look and feel like they are the same site, I am planning to map a subdomain to the blog site for example if portfolio site is x.com then blog site will be x.blog.com
However I doubt if WordPress allows full customizations to the site so I do not know if I can achieve this in WordPress.
Features I have listed out for the blog site are:
1. Admin panel to add posts (using Markdown or any Rich text editing)
2. Home page to display all posts
3. Search functionality, categorization of posts, filter and sorting
4. Comments sections and spam filter
5. Newsletter to receive updates for new posts
6. A nice UI (it will be best if the look and feel matches the portfolio site)
7. SEO
8. Feature to like blog post
9. Analytics (Optional)
10. Media upload (Images/gifs/video) to blog posts
I thought it will be best to ask the wordpress community especially Software Engineers who have a tech blog in wordpress other people opinions are welcome as well.
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Wonder if you are knowledge in programming, why not give [Astro.build]) a try?
Quite a few new and seasonal devs, engineers and professionals use it.
If you want to go with WP create your custom theme and code everything. You can use starter themes which gives you basic file architecture and minimal setup, from there you write your html, php, css and javascript. Underscores theme is not bad at all, coupled with advanced custom fields (ACF) plugin (although you may want to pay for pro feature since you get repeater fields which are really helpful). For newsletter you can use mailchimp, for contact forms – contact form 7 plugin. WordPress is fully customizable. When you install wp you get api automatically, so when you create new posts or custom post types, they have api endpoints that you can use to filter content. Call fetch with js, pass it an endpoint where you can add url parameters for filters and render it with js. Or even better, there are wordpress hooks that you can use to create custom API routes where you can filter stuff with PHP and return html that you will render with JS.