This is the first post on this newly revamped and more database driven website, my original intention was to create a static website to host my portfolio and my projects but as time went on I decided it would be best to make it database driven so in future I don’t need to edit HTML even if it did mean putting the hard work in and creating all the systems necessary to do that.

The first iteration of this site was created in December 2017 using vanilla PHP with no form of templating system and the only dynamic part was the Portfolio page, that was generated using a hand written JSON file to populate the websites I had previously worked on.

Later on during my time learning the Laravel framework around August last year, I decided it would be worth moving the site over to using Laravel as it would make it easier to add more features later on such as this Blog and of course the Portfolio page, the only thing that isn’t generated using the database is the Index page and the Projects page which is generated from a JSON feed from my GitHub profile.

This isn’t my first Laravel project, there’s an abandoned Store project sitting on my GitHub from when I first started learning the framework and is full of my frustrations and mistakes from getting to grips with it, hopefully in the future I’ll write some follow up posts on my thoughts on Laravel and some of the features I struggled to get my head around at first as well as the features I'd like to add later to this website.