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This site used to run on ProcessWire (PHP). I chose it because I really don't like WordPress, but I do like PHP. That combination alone eliminates about 90% of the internet's opinions.
The design was done with modern, plain CSS. No frameworks, yeah. I also sprinkled in a lot of hand-drawn pixel art, rendered with image-rendering: pixelated, because pixel art is awesome.
ProcessWire is genuinely good in a lot of ways. The query language is clean, the templating system makes sense. You define post types and fields through the UI, content lives in a tree, and hierarchy feels natural.
Unfortunately, that is also the problem. Too much is defined in the UI. Post types, fields, structure--all clicky, not code-first. Which is fine until you want to refactor confidently, or just remember how your own site works six months later.
Maintaining the site slowly became annoying. Updating it wasn't fun. And since I take security seriously, "not fun" quickly turns into "I'm not doing this tonight," which then becomes "I haven't touched this in a year."
Eventually, I did the most honest thing possible: I took the site down and replaced it with a plain Coming Soon page.
At some point, I accepted that I just enjoy the JavaScript ecosystem now. So I rebuilt the site using Strapi and Next.js.
I ported the original design into React while keeping the plain CSS (yes, still plain), and wired everything up to fetch content from Strapi. It was actually fun for once.
Right now, this article exists so the homepage isn't empty.
Next steps:
Yes, I like Tailwind. Fight me.
For now, the site is alive again. That's good enough for tonight.