Welcome to our new website! After a very long development phase, there is now a lot of new content, interactive features and a new technical framework that can be reused by anyone.
Why we don’t use WordPress anymore
Since Fab City Hamburg e. V. was founded, our website was based on the free content management system WordPress. WordPress is a great tool, but it also comes with some problems: Besides the high maintenance effort due to necessary security updates, it is also hard to create website content with WordPress in a public collaborative way. Only people who have an account for the WordPress admin panel can ever work on the site.
However, according to our association purpose and our closeness to the Open Source idea, we actually want to allow public collaboration. Every person should be able to make a suggestion to change our website. That’s why the new Fab City Hamburg site is now no longer based on a classic content management system like WordPress, but on a so-called Static Site Generator.
This Static Site Generator called Astro allows us to store the content of the website in simple text files (markdown files to be precise) - not in a database as with classical CMS. We can then make these files available to the public via our own GitLab platform. Thus, anyone interested can propose a change to the website content. As an example, the source file for this very blog post can be found here.
Technical platform is freely available
The entire technical platform of our new website, consisting of a custom UI library with reusable React components and the appropriately configured site generator Astro is part of the “Fab City OS Suite” and is thus freely available under an open source license.
Anyone interested can therefore reuse the website in whole or in part and fill it with their own content.
Fast, small and privacy friendly
Due to the new technical base on site generator basis, most of our site is created once on the server and therefore can be loaded very quickly. Only a few elements on the site are dynamic and require JavaScript and the React framework. That’s why the loading times on our new site are consistently faster than a classical WordPress site.
This is also due to the fact that we do not use any bloated tracking tools and plugins (like Google Analytics). Our website does not use cookies, and therefore does not need to display any annoying cookie banner. Only a very small number of external services are integrated: Map data from Mapbox (for the Fab Map), YouTube integrations (as a “nocookie” variant), an (optional) newsletter with signup form from Sendinblue, and a privacy-friendly statistics solution called Umami, which we also host ourselves.
