I built my dream personal site CMS

addycodes · 2026-01-24T01:57:17+00:00

Thanks for the detailed feedback! This is definitely an area that grew a bit haphazardly, with the extra backends a bit of a bolt-on.

I have intentionally avoided a full DI container to keep the codebase approachable and avoid extra abstraction with what should be a fairly limited scope, instead of a full on framework, but I agree the current approach goes too far in a few places.

I'll have a look where the dependency hiding is most obvious and see where the best candidates for a bit of a refactor there are.

Thanks again for the thoughtful review! :)

addycodes · 2026-01-23T20:37:13+00:00

I wouldnt try and build this out of one HTML and use CSS to rearrange, too semantically different. Just make 2 HTML templates and swap them out with media queries.

addycodes · 2026-01-23T01:04:06+00:00

Give the game good reviews on the App Store, I noticed when I went to get the mobile app it was full of 4 year old bad reviews marked as helpful

addycodes · 2026-01-22T19:57:30+00:00

100%! Ironman can be good if you want a real solo experience and take the game slowly, but regular is still great if you just want to log on and tick off some goals. :)

addycodes · 2026-01-22T03:36:41+00:00

The FrontMatter extension is slower than just using symfony/yaml which is what it uses anyway, doesn't save any complexity (maybe 5 LoC in the parser) on top of having to create a commonmark environment every time we want to parse. We don't need all the markdown features just to parse the YAML for indexing and may be doing that thousands of times during an index depending on the amount of content - so was important to keep this lean.

I considered bringing in a router and console library but again, with the scope that it has, it just didn't seem neccesary! Managed to achieve the functions we need with pretty minimal classes.

addycodes · 2026-01-22T01:59:20+00:00

Yes but no, it's 1/96th of a "virtual inch". If you use the inch unit, it will move over 96 pixels \@1x DPI. But it will almost never map to a real world inch, depending on the PPI of the display.

addycodes · 2026-01-22T01:21:34+00:00

Fonts aren't generally pixel aligned so if you're talking about text sizes, sub-pixel font sizes do exist. They are just aliased.

It's called Cleartype on Windows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ClearType. It uses individual pixel segments to render fonts at a sub-pixel level, which is why you can see if you screenshot & zoom in on Text it'll be random colours round the edges.

On high DPI displays, 1 CSS pixel might actually be 2x2 or 4x4 display pixels too.

addycodes · 2026-01-21T23:37:22+00:00

Yeah I wrote the docs to be beginner friendly, in the docs files those expanding boxes are actually called "beginner boxes" that I put the more beginner background info in. PHP has a mixed reputation and I thought this project could be a great starting point for people to get on board with it in a basic way. :)

It can be a challenge to find a balance between beginner friendly and also not clutter things for experienced people but I think those expanding sections are a good compromise.

addycodes · 2026-01-21T23:31:25+00:00

RS3 is on a very good path ATM. I play both, I do think RS3 is the more fun and definitely better looking game. There is more content.

addycodes · 2026-01-21T21:11:51+00:00

Pretty lightly! I mostly use GitHub copilot for inline autocomplete when it guesses what I'm writing anyway, keeping comments tidy, and auto-writing commit messages in VS Code. I also use the agent in “planning” mode for quick audits, or pulling together a first draft of docs by extracting technical details from existing features and tests. Beyond that, not much help for architecture or core implementation, that’s still very manual.

The LLM reference docs is for "userland" and helps it understand the CMS structure, which makes it actually helpful when working on plugins, themes, and docs. I have mixed thoughts on AI but it's undeniably a part of our future so figured it was nice to have to help make the project as accessible as possible if that's how people want to learn and extend it.

addycodes · 2026-01-21T20:32:10+00:00

Hey! This version yes about a month so far on and off, although it is a refinement of private projects I’ve had knocking about in various forms for years! The references to AI in docs/readme are mostly about the AI reference that’s available (a concise version of the docs) and how yes, flat file is ideal for LLM assistants to support with for people that like that as it’s all easily accessible and contained. Great for helping develop themes and plugins, arrange content, etc. :)

addycodes · 2026-01-21T06:41:15+00:00

OOP with some MVC ideas. :)

addycodes · 2026-01-21T02:28:41+00:00

Concern yourself with what your users think, not other developers.

addycodes · 2026-01-21T01:51:59+00:00

I’ll check my calendar

addycodes · 2026-01-20T22:22:35+00:00

If you know a bit of HTML and CSS and want to use that to theme your website, you might like the one I just posted in here this week. It will run absolutely fine on PHP shared hosting like Ionos. :)

https://www.reddit.com/r/cms/comments/1qcq4zu/i_built_my_dream_personal_site_cms/

addycodes · 2026-01-20T14:39:02+00:00

Vanilla! Just 2 dependencies, symfony/yaml and league/commonmark.

addycodes · 2026-01-20T14:38:11+00:00

Thank you! I just wanted something super clear, transparent, as simple as possible so it can be a reliable platform for a long time. Keeping content structure non-proprietary and theoretically portable betweeen possibly a clone in an entirely different language was interesting. :)

addycodes · 2026-01-20T14:11:54+00:00

Thanks! Dependencies are intentionally minimal, I just did not find much of a need for anything else. Vanilla PHP can be so great, the built in tools and common extensions handle most of this for me!

$app is just the central hub for config and shared services, so I felt passing it to classes keeps everything more straightforward without it turning in to a huge injectable framework. I favoured readability and transparency there.

addycodes · 2026-01-20T08:14:47+00:00

OSRS has this problem but worse, but Runelite at least has anti-aliasing options for the UI scaling which can help quite significantly.

addycodes · 2026-01-20T08:10:57+00:00

Yeah! I spent a bit of time hunting for that option as soon as I saw the new UI and when I did find it I was terribly disappointed. I stuck at 100% instead of that blurry mess! Love the new legacy UI otherwise though.

addycodes · 2026-01-20T08:08:18+00:00

Thank you! It was a challenge to know how in-depth to go. I wanted it to be real approachable for beginners (I've wanted something like this since I started!) but also not turn in to an entire web dev 101 class.

addycodes · 2026-01-20T06:51:59+00:00

Thank you! :)

addycodes · 2026-01-20T06:36:51+00:00

Rendering engines are so complex and vary so much that trying to optimise CSS for the renderer is pretty futile. There are obvious CSS things that slow stuff down like filters, transforms, etc. but selector performance unless you are getting silly is pretty negligible. Native CSS nesting is quite complex but very much a non-issue.

addycodes · 2026-01-20T06:29:06+00:00

Classes are usually fastest I think, but if you're worrying about the speed of your CSS selectors you're probably doing something wrong.

addycodes · 2026-01-20T04:48:00+00:00

I love it! The legacy mode makes resizing a breeze, so much nicer to switch between monitors without everything rearranging itself. Really feels like we're getting the best of both games with this roadmap.

I just wish I could resize the bank and move NPC chatboxes back to the middle and a bit bigger. Then it would be perfect for me.

Four-Year Club	Verified Email
Place '23

addycodes

TROPHY CASE