Comment by johnnyworker

I kept making CMS as a hobby, starting with flat files and PHP, moving to MySQL.. simple things. I did it precisely because I figured if I modify and write plugins for Wordpress, I would have to keep updating them on their schedule. Especially since even back then I really liked removing things I don't want, and while carrying over additions I created over to new versions might be easy enough, maintaining a stripped down version of something like Wordpress (even 20 years ago..) would have been impossible.

I felt like a stubborn dumb ass in the early 2000s (and there was also this constant mockery of "NIH syndrome" in the air) but by now, I'm so glad I basically disregarded a lot of stuff and just made my own things out of the basics. And coincidentally, the last one I made has also lasted me over 12 years by now. I still love it actually, it's just the code that is terrible. So I started a new one, to fix all the mistakes of the previous one, which mostly is cutting less corners because now I know that I'll use this for way longer than I can reasonably estimate right now, so I try to be kind(er) to future me.

(But I'll also make fascinating new mistakes, because I decided to de-duplicate more or less everything at the DB level, on a whim, without prior experience or reading up on it. And then I'll write some monstrosity to pipe 12 years of content from the old CMS into the new one, and I will not break a single link even though nobody would really care. Just because I can.)