Most personal sites are a handful of pages that you edit in code, rebuild and upload. Mine has no pages in the code at all. rusu-ionut.ro is a small content management system that I built for myself: the pages, menus, blog articles and portfolio projects live in a database, and the site draws whatever the API returns for the address you opened.

This article is the tour I would have wanted before starting: how the site is put together, what is in it, how I keep it from breaking, and the handful of lessons that cost me the most time. The first commit of this rebuild is dated 25 September 2026, and at the time of writing the site is already on version 1.29.

The idea: a site with no hardcoded pages

The rule I started from is simple: a new public URL should be a piece of content, not a code change. If I want a new page I open the backoffice, give it a title, a place in the page tree and a layout, and drop content blocks onto it. No build, no deploy, no pull request.

That rule shaped everything else.…