Behind the CSScenes, October 2022

Well, hey, welcome back to Behind the CSScenes! These posts are like little check-ins we’re doing each month to give you a peek behind what we’re doing here at CSS-Tricks, as well as a chance for us to pause and celebrate a few things.

There’s more work to do, of course! This month, we have a little more to share with you on the development side of things, plus a roundup of some recent activity around here. So, let’s dial in Haley Mills for the latest.

[Haley:] September was a busy month for our team! We published 16 articles by guest authors and another 15 by folks on our team. In addition to these, we’ve been updating many of the older articles, including adding freshly-linked resources. We’ve already updated over 50 articles and will continue these efforts as part of our day-to-day work. Thank you to the team and the awesome authors who contributed this content!

Have a suggestion for a guide that you’d love to see? Let us know in the comments!

Thanks for reading the content updates! Next up we have our senior web developer, David Berg, with an update on the back-end work we’re doing to move CSS-Tricks to a new CMS.

If anything has been challenging so far, it’s been aligning the WordPress data from the current site with the structure of our internal system. Our team currently uses a properly vetted, maintained, and organized PostgreSQL database that interfaces with the client through an array of in-repository services over which we maintain tight code control and quality. The WordPress database structure is unintuitive — at least to me and our team — and has required our team to find obscure and maybe overly complex solutions to mash these things together.

That said, migrating CSS-Tricks content over to our in-house solution allows us to ensure the integrity and future-proofing of complex database relationships. Through this process, we can slim down the time it takes to query the database, improve efficiencies of three (or more)-dimensional relationships, and accurately model new relationships according to new features we might develop down the road.

In short, that means we will no longer be reliant on a monolithic WordPress instance to serve a response to every request. We can statically export all the publicly accessible content to a CDN, with the services handling edit operations only when needed.

[Haley:] Speaking of a more robust back end architecture, something else happening behind the scenes is a new form for guest authors submitting article proposals to us for publication.

While it might seem like a fairly minor thing, it’s a big deal as far as making it easier to share your proposals and making sure nothing falls through the cracks — so we have fresh new front-end content to publish for you on a consistent basis!

Passing it back to Geoff with my favorite part of these updates: author highlights!

[Geoff:] The articles you read here at CSS-Tricks are written by folks like yourself. It’s amazing just how gosh darned smart this community is and all the ideas that get passed around here. In fact, we welcomed 5 new voices this past month:

High fives to all these folks, and to you for reading. ✋ We wouldn’t be doing this without y’all.

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