Elanat VS Grav

As you know, Elanat CMS is a content management system that has migrated from .NET Standard to .NET Core. In Elanat CMS, some things are still remembered from the .NET standard; it is interesting to note that the App_Data directory still exists in Elanat CMS!

Elanat CMS is a large and powerful content management system based on ASP.NET Core. Elanat CMS is a CMS-Framework that does not use any of the default ASP.NET Core frameworks (Razor Pages, MVC, Blazor). Elanat CMS is built under CodeBehind Framework. Elanat CMS and CodeBehind Framework both belong to Elanat team.

Elanat CMS has nearly 600 View files. With a mid-range processor it only takes 9 seconds to compile View. It is interesting to know that in previous versions, it took about 35 seconds to compile View pages in Elanat CMS.

The CodeBehind framework belongs to the Elanat team and its first version was released in 2023.

The Elanat team has again taken a new initiative and created the feature of sending template blocks through ViewData. You can now enclose template variables within {@#TempName} brackets so that double-quote ("{@#TempName}") characters do not cause problems in code blocks.

What is the concept of the module according to the Elanat team? Any interpreted programming language used on the server side is itself modular. That is, it is enough to copy executable files (py, php, rb, etc.) and other files (css, js, image, etc.) to the current project; A set of executable files and other related files are a module. In compiled programming languages or compiled frameworks such as C++, Java and .NET, creating a modular system is complex. Back-end framework developers should provide solutions for creating a modular system for web-based system developers.

The CodeBehind framework is a back-end type and belongs to the Elanat team. CodeBehind is a framework for ASP.NET Core and is a competitor to the default cshtml structure in ASP.NET Core.

aspx files used to be supported by Microsoft, but now the modern and powerful CodeBehind framework belonging to the Elanat team has given new life to aspx files. aspx extensions now support Razor syntax and return templates and are the most important competitor to ASP.NET Core's default cshtml structure while maintaining .NET Core features.

Elanat is a free and open-source CMS-Framework based on ASP.NET Core. Elanat was created to be a reliable system in .NET and an honor for .NET programmers and can be compared to other systems under PHP and JAVA.

Elanat repository link: https://github.com/elanatframework/Elanat

There are flat-file CMSes (content management systems) like Grav: https://getgrav.org/

I guess, in some vague/broad sense, config-as-code systems also implement something similar? Maybe even OpenAPI schemas could count to some degree...?

In the old days, the "semantic web" movement was an attempt to make more webpages both human- and machine-readable indefinitely by tagging them with proper schema: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework. Even Google was on board for a while, but I guess it never saw much uptake. As far as I can tell it's basically dead now, both because of non-semantic HTML (everything as a React div), general laziness, and LLMs being able to parse things loosely.

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Side thoughts...

Philosophically, I don't know that capturing raw data alone as files is really sufficient to capture the nuances of any particular experience, or the overall zeitgeist of an era. You can archive Geocities pages, but that doesn't really capture the novelty and indie-ness of that era. Similarly, you can save TikTok videos, but absent the cultural environment that created them (and a faithful recreation of the recommendation algorithm), they wouldn't really show future archaeologists how teenagers today lived.

I worked for a natural history museum for a while, and while we were there, one of the interesting questions (well, to me anyway) was whether our web content was in and of itself worth preserving as a cultural artifact -- both so that future generations can see what exhibits were interesting/apropos for the cultures of our times, but also so they could see how our generation found out about those exhibitions to begin with (who knows what the Web will morph into 50 years later). It wasn't enough to simply save the HTML of our web pages, both because they tie into various other APIs and databases (like zoological collections) and because some were interactive experiences, like games designed to be played with a mouse (before phones were popular), or phone chatbots with some of our specimens. To really capture the experience authentically would've required emulating not just our tech stacks and devices, among other things.

Like for the earlier Geocities example, sure you could just save the old HTML and render it with a modern browser, but that's not the same as something like https://oldweb.today/?browser=ns3-mac#http://geocities.com/ , which emulates the whole OS and browser too. And that still isn't the same as having to sit in front of a tiny CRT and wait minutes for everything to download over a 14.4k modem, only to be interrupted when mom had to make a call.

I guess that's a longwinded of critiquing "file over app": It only makes sense for things that are originally files/documents to begin with. Much of our lives now are not flat docs but "experiences" that take much more thought and effort to archive. If the goal is truly to preserve that posterity, it's not enough to just archive their raw data, but to develop ways to record and later emulate entire experiences, both technological and cultural. It ain't easy!

I took a more traditional approach, focusing on something that's "good enough", which in my case was a cheap VPS and an install of Grav: https://getgrav.org/

Some optional customization for page templates/fonts/CSS, some CI so I can build and deploy it inside of a Docker container, Matomo for analytics that respect privacy (which I already use elsewhere) and some additional web server configuration to hide anything interesting behind an additional login and I'm good. Maybe backups and uptime monitoring if I'm feeling brave, which is what most sites should also have (so copy + paste there).

All of that for under 100 euros per year (could also pay half of that if I didn't host anything else on the server), the blog has actually survived getting on the front page of HN once or twice and requires relatively little maintenance, at least a bit less than a proper install of WordPress, due to its larger surface area.

The best thing is that it's simple enough for me to understand how it works, to be able to move it anywhere as needed and use more or less plain Markdown for writing the blog posts. Here's a quick example of a recent post: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/ever-wanted-to-read-thousan...

Now all that's left is to find motivation to write more, but at least 90% of my time doesn't go into tinkering with custom fancy solutions, no matter how much I'd love that. Then again, nothing wrong with the alternatives either: 400 euros might be perfectly worth it for some, whereas working with static site generators or even custom CMSes would be a fun experience for others!

I'd check out Grav. https://getgrav.org/

Also, there is a CMS called Grav. Both Gravity and Grav use a very similar (but not identical) font for their logo.

I would use a flat file cms like https://getgrav.org