Modern Web Development on the JAMstack

Chapter 6. Applying the JAMstack at Scale

A Case Study: Smashing Magazine

Smashing Magazine has been a steady presence in the frontend development space for more than a decade, publishing high-quality content on themes like frontend development, design, user experience (UX), and web performance.

At the end of 2017, Smashing Magazine completely rewrote and redesigned its site to switch from a system based on several traditional, monolithic applications to the JAMstack. This chapter showcases how it solved challenges like ecommerce, content management, commenting, subscriptions, and working with a JAMstack project at scale.

The Challenge

In its 10 years of operation, Smashingmagazine.com has evolved from a basic Wordpress blog to a large online estate, spanning multiple development platforms and technologies.

Before the relaunch, the main magazine was run as a Wordpress blog with thousands of articles, around 200,000 comments, and hundreds of authors and categories. Additionally, the Smashing team ran an ecommerce site selling printed books, ebooks, workshops, and events through a Shopify store with a separate implementation of its HTML/CSS/JavaScript theme. The magazine also operated a Ruby on Rails app as its job board (reimplementing the Wordpress theme to work in Rails, with Embedded Ruby [ERB] templates) and a separate site built with a flat-file Content Management System (CMS) called Kirby (which brought an additional PHP stack, not necessarily in step with the PHP stack ...