A lesson From The Past : How My Supposed To be Simple CMS Turn into 3 months Of  Development Hell

 Edit Post: DEV LOG: SIMPLE CMS GONE ROUGE

xD

Sept 4, 2026: THE HATE (or How I Accidentally Built a CMS)

You know, I never hated WordPress. It’s a solid platform — tons of plugins, a galaxy-sized community, and years of polish. Honestly, it’s a miracle of open-source longevity.

But let’s be real… the moment you try editing a theme, it’s like stepping into an archaeological dig site made of PHP spaghetti.  And those “free” plugins? Yeah, free until you need the Save Button™ — that’ll be $49 a year, thank you very much. 

So one day I told myself, “Screw it, I’ll just build my own CMS.” Famous last words, right?

What started as “just a simple blog engine” turned into a full-blown monster with migrations, observers, queued jobs, backup systems, spam filters, and enough Blade templates to qualify as a horror anthology.

My Laravel log file? Bro, it’s thicker than a Stephen King novel. 

Looking back, maybe I should’ve just stuck with WordPress — but then again, where’s the fun in that? At least now when something breaks, I can only blame me, not some random plugin named “UltraSEO Max PRO v12.9.7 Beta”. 

CMS : THE REALITY

At first, I thought, “How hard can it be? It’s just a CRUD app — Create, Read, Update, Delete.” Classic rookie optimism. 

But reality hit faster than a failed composer install.

A real CMS isn’t just CRUD — it’s CRUD wearing an Iron Man suit, juggling backups, permissions, spam filters, SEO metadata, and user roles while whispering, “One more feature won’t hurt…” Spoiler: it will. It always does. 💀

You start with a few database tables and before you know it, you’ve built a half-decent clone of WordPress… minus the plugins, themes, and ten years of community bug reports.

It’s not that CMS is hard — it’s that CMS is endless. Every “simple” feature opens a new rabbit hole. Add comments? Now you need moderation. Add images? Now you need storage drivers, thumbnails, and cache invalidation.

At some point, I realized I wasn’t coding a blog anymore — I was coding regret, wrapped neatly in Laravel syntax. 

At first, I thought a CMS was just CRUD — you know, a couple of posts, slugs, and categories. Easy weekend project, right? Wrong.

The deeper you go, the more you realize a CMS isn’t just “Create, Read, Update, Delete.” It’s “Create, Read, Update, Delete, Panic, Refactor, and Add Features Nobody Asked For.”

You start adding comments. Then you need spam protection. Then backups. Then email notifications. Suddenly, you’re writing your own mini WordPress and your log file reads like a thriller novel.

Making a CMS isn’t about CRUD — it’s about pain tolerance and caffeine management

THE FEATURE CREEPS

It started innocent enough — “maybe I’ll just add an audit log, y’know, to see who deleted what.” Next thing I know, I’m knee-deep in a custom anti-spam lab, testing regex rules like some mad scientist at 3AM, trying to stop bots selling sunglasses in my comments section.

Then came the auto mail blast system — because who doesn’t want to feel like a one-person marketing agency, right? Except mine decided to send the same email twice. Sometimes thrice. Once it even sent the unsubscribe link to the wrong person. That was fun.

“Oh, just one more feature,” I said. Famous last words again. Next thing, I’m adding SEO plugins, an affiliate program manager, and a language selector — even though I’m too lazy to actually localize anything. So now my CMS proudly displays a dropdown that does absolutely nothing.

Then came traffic analytics, because apparently I wanted to spy on my own loneliness. Every page view is just me, refreshing the dashboard, pretending it’s “real-time engagement.”

It’s like every time I add a feature, I accidentally open another Pandora’s box — something breaks, a new bug appears, and I’m debugging code I don’t even remember writing. It’s not a CMS anymore. It’s a living organism, feeding on my sanity and caffeine supply.

They call it feature creep. I call it character development in the most wrongfull possible way

LESSON

I think i started to learn my lesson now that re-inventing the wheel isn't always a good idea afterall. if you got something that's totaly usefull and its free, why bother making your live misserable . But Since now i kinda stuck with the mamoth of my own making. so why might as well just used it . A fine lesson in 3 moths time and 100 stack overflow tabs indeed