This was my most ambitious build yet, was a ton of fun to build, and the client was a delight to work with. The client came to me with their existing WordPress build and many frustrations with their current solution, namely outdated design and difficult-to-manage backend. We first started I was initially planning to use my recently finished "fire-react-base" template which is based on the SPA (single page app) of CRA (create-react-app) baseline, but realized that their articles being SEO friendly was a requirement, more than any other of my projects. They had a huge backlog of articles that still were getting thousands of monthly hits on average, like their Techno Viking article. I heard rumblings about "Next.js" being an up-and-coming library to use for React.js projects instead of CRA, but I was reluctant to change directions since I had built myself such a strong ecosystem with CRA. I took the time and effort to learn Next.js and transition my whole custom CMS that was built on CRA over to a new framework. This decision ended up being well worth the effort, as the project was a huge success and we have another happy client!

One of the biggest pain points was just swapping the old WordPress build to a temporary domain (6amgroup.co for now) so the client could still access old articles. Fortunately, I learned these lessons just a month or so earlier on my other project downbeats.com which also had a WordPress backend with a blog to-be-referenced, but much fewer users during the downtime for the swap. WordPress builds are so messy when I take over a project and too many references that are hardcoded to the old URL. Another difficulty was working with the PayPal API for their content promo service which just allowed a user to fill out a form, which initiated payment. Relative to working with the Stripe payments API on my Minute.tech projects and their stellar developer experience, the PayPal DX was cumbersome.