This is not WordPress
This site and the content management system behind it is not built with WordPress, or Wix, or Squarespace. This is my own custom publishing system, built for my own purposes, the way I want, with real publishing flow from draft to staging to production. It is nearly free. It effortlessly beats the pants off of my WordPress sites (I'm hosting about 30 WP sites on a high-performance cloud server.) It's more secure. I have full revision history and local backup with the source code. I built it for myself, with my own stack of AI agentic coding tools. It uses some of the best modern open source software...
The tech stack
More specifically, the stack looks like this right now:
- Astro 6 with the Cloudflare adapter, so the public site stays lean and fast while still letting me run server-side logic where I need it.
- React islands inside Astro for the CMS studio and other interactive pieces, instead of shipping a huge front-end app to every public page.
- Convex as the authoring back end for drafts, revisions, staged content, and publishing state.
- GitHub as the publishing source of truth. When I publish, content is written into the repo, committed, and deployed with the site.
- Puck for visual page building and Tiptap for long-form post editing.
- Tailwind CSS 4 with shadcn/ui and Radix primitives for the interface layer.
- WorkOS for studio authentication and access control.
- Cloudflare R2 for media storage and Cloudflare Turnstile on forms.
- Published content lives alongside the source code, which keeps the site portable, versioned, and easy to back up.
Tools I used to build it
Built with T3Code and using models from Anthropic and OpenAI with a little persuasion from my own "prompt engineering."