Creating my website with Forestry CMS

Welcome to my new Website!

There are so many technologies nowadays, that it can be hard to decide which one to choose. For my website, Sébastien Paquet, I created it with some new technologies that I will describe a bit more later. I also added Forestry CMS as the content management side, that way it will be easy to write more blog posts or update my website without any difficulty. There are so much different options to be used as a CMS, so let me show you why I chose Forestry as my CMS and why it could be yours too if you want it.

Building a website with Forestry as CMS

The beauty with forestry is that it is git-based, what it means is that:

• Your content will live inside your codebase, it will not be hosted somewhere else and will never prevent your content from being accessed if the CMS you chose is no longer online.

• You could also easily stop using Forestry and continue creating posts directly inside your code.

• You keep control of your content since it is not stored everywhere but instead directly on your website.

All those points make a good future-proof CMS because in the worst case, your content will always be available.

Forestry only manages your content, this allows you to use a design that is not tied to your CMS because it acts as a headless CMS. Nothing is stopping you from designing a website exactly as you want. Since I love Forestry so much, I build my blog with it, so you can easily see what it can do for you! It makes it so easy to write a new post, but it can also design more complex pages like a contact page to update your opening hours, or to change the layout and content of your landing page.

I also made it easy to translate my website between two languages, without having to build all of your content for all languages separately. You only need to build the page or blog post once, and then configure the parts that can change on each language, but keep the common stuff intact.

How does Forestry serve my website?

You may ask yourself how can forestry serve my website if finally, it's only saving all of my contents locally? Well, that's because Forestry's job is to only manage the content. I'm using Nuxt to build my website. What Nuxt does is compile all my website, every page, every blog post, every language is generated into a static website.

On every change to the code base, by using Forestry or changing the code, Nuxt recompiles everything. Then all that's left is to host what's generated this way and it's done! This way when someone visits my website, the server does nothing else than serve the corresponding HTML, there is not even one call to a CMS, it's already done! This leaves me with a very fast website because the server does not do anything except serve the requested page.

Why Forestry?

Forestry have so many advantages from your standard CMS, so let me finish this article with some of my favorites:

• You are the real owner of your data because everything is saved directly on your website

• If there is a problem, since it is git-based, you can easily revert your code to an older version

• The UI is easy to understand and fast

• It's FREE! There is a free price tier that is free for up to 3 content manager

• You can preview your changes before deploying to the internet, so you can see what your new content will look like without any risk

• You decide what you want to customize, you can do only some part of your website and keep the rest static, or do all of it, it's up to you to decide

There is so much cool stuff about Forestry, that's why I'm using it for my website! You can learn more directly at https://forestry.io/

Are you interested?

I'm using Forestry daily, it is such a breeze to work with it. That's why I recommend you to try it too! If such a project interests you, don't hesitate to contact me, I would love to help you with your next project!

Stay put for more content in the future!