👋 Welcome to the Mindescape blog website
This project is a complement to the Mindescape CMS project. Mindescape CMS is a content management system created for Mindescape administrators and editors, while this project is a blog for the end user. Although these two applications are separate creations, I wanted to show their relationship to each other and the way they talk through the API routes (CORS enabled).
👉 You can dive deeper into Mindescape CMS documentation right here.
| Frontend | Backend | Design |
|---|---|---|
| Next.js | Next.js | Figma |
| React | Font Awesome | |
| Sass | Unsplash | |
| Pixabay |
Despite the simple nature of the project, it includes many interesting functionalities.
The whole listing is managed in one place - only one route. Based on the query strings in the URL, a different data will be rendered.
Sample URL to get all articles: /articles?page=1&featured=false.
Sample URL to get all featured articles: /articles?page=1&featured=true.
Based on the encoded page number in the URL e.g. page=1, the getServerSideProps function will paginate the data on the server and serve some portion of data dynamically. For now, there are 4 articles served per page.
If featured=false, all articles are returned. If true, only featured will be served by the server.
I put a lot of effort into SEO aspects. It's a blog and nobody wants to have a non-crawlable website where all key actions are taken on the client side. There's a discussion about the client-side rendering and the SEO but the best practice, as long as you value to be indexed, is to serve the static content by your server or render the content on the fly/dynamically on the server. Next.js offers incredible features like getStaticProps and getServerSideProps. Both are amazing but depending on the situation, only one of them is the key.
getStaticProps allows to pre-generate dynamic content (e.g. when fetch data from some API) during the build process. I used this function to pre-generate article pages. There's no need for dynamic rendering on the server so the build process just fits well. I have specified all paths in getStaticPaths, and even if not, the fallback: 'blocking' or fallback: 'true' property will allow the server to do the job. The property revalidate will re-fetch the data from the resource after a specified amount of time when the request is made so the data at certain time intervals is updated (re-fetched).
The opposite is the /articles?... page where we have endless possibilities for dynamic URL paths. With the help of getServerSideProps function that runs on the server, we can pre-generate any pages on the fly. Static content is returned from the server to the end user, so crawlers can index the content of a page. That's in a nutshell.
All kinds of errors 400 500 & success messages are handled in the UI.
I handled redirections on /articles page. The user will be redirected from /articles to /articles?page=1&featured=false page.
- Search by title
- By phrase
- Featured tag
Users can sign up for a newsletter.
Users can leave a comment under an article.
Users can send a message.
When I design an interface, I am guided by one thing. I always design an interface that I would like to use myself. In short, friendly and easy to use. I am happy with the design - it's modern, clean and mobile devices friendly.
