Two updates in as many days, I know! In my rush to post yesterday's site update, I left out a couple of items worth calling out.

UI Changes

In yesterday's post, I focused mostly on the technical changes to the application's backend, but to some it may have seemed like I buried the lede—the UI refresh.

The most recent iterations of the site used Bootstrap along with a variety of themes from Bootswatch. I was very happy with both, but I was ready for a UI refresh, and the timing of building metaApps.CMS happened to coincide nicely with the launch of Web Awesome. If you aren't familiar with Web Awesome, it began as the open source project Shoelace (its core still is) before joining forces with the fine folks at Font Awesome.

From the Web Awesome website:

Web Awesome is the biggest open-source library of meticulously designed, highly customizable, web-standards-based, and framework-agnostic UI components.

So far, my experience with Web Awesome has been—well—awesome! I'm very much looking forward to building the Admin UI with it.

A quick aside: the move from Bootstrap to Web Awesome is specific to this site. metaApps.CMS provides overrideable ASP.NET UI components that use Bootstrap, which makes sense given its continued popularity. However, I can easily see myself adding Web Awesome versions down the road.

URL Changes

Another change that went unmentioned yesterday involves the site's URLs. The primary update was the addition of the /blog fragment, now prepended to all blog content. This includes:

• posts
• categories
• archives

Old URL structure:

Blog homepage: /posts
Specific post: /posts/post-slug
Categories: /categories
Specific category: /categories/category-slug
Archives: /archives
Specific archive: /archives/2025

New URL structure:

Blog homepage: /blog
Specific post: /blog/posts/post-slug
Categories: /blog/categories
Specific category: /blog/categories/category-slug
Archives: /blog/archives
Specific archive: /blog/archives/2025

Additionally, there are new URLs:

All blog posts (paginated): /blog/posts
Tags: /blog/tags
Specific tag: /blog/tags/tag-slug

To accomodate the change in URL structure, I added a simple redirect so that URLs following the old pattern automatically forward to the new one.

For example, clicking /posts/the-indieweb-and-other-updates will take you to /blog/posts/the-indieweb-and-other-updates.

In Conclusion

This site overhaul was a big change—a new backend and new frontend—and I'm not done. Expect additional updates as I add features to both the site and metaApps.CMS, along with a write-up of my experience getting up to speed with Web Awesome.