Building My Own Lightweight CMS for Future Projects

Over the past few weeks, as I’ve had more time to focus on personal projects, I finally decided to build something I’ve been planning for a long time — my own content management system (CMS).

The main reason was simple: I needed a lightweight, flexible CMS that could power my blogs, landing pages, and future products. Most existing systems felt too heavy for my needs — I wanted something fast, customizable, and developer-friendly.

Early look at my minimal CMS setup — clean, simple, and focused on speed.

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⚙️ Simplicity First

To keep things as lean as possible, I based the CMS on just three data types:

• Markdown — for rich text editing
• String — for standard text fields
• Number — for numeric values

Markdown turned out to be a perfect choice. It gives me flexibility while keeping editing clean and predictable — no cluttered WYSIWYG editors.

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🔗 Public IDs for API Endpoints

Each project and entry in the CMS is exposed via a public API endpoint.
Instead of leaking internal IDs, I use a public ID system that lets me safely connect and query entries across different projects.

This approach allows me to:

• Fetch entries securely via their public IDs
• Build pages dynamically using API data
• Keep my backend structure private

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🖼️ Media Handling with n8n and Google Drive

For images, I didn’t want to spend time building a file upload system.
Instead, I integrated Google Drive with n8n, which handles fetching and displaying images dynamically.
It’s a simple and elegant workaround that fits perfectly into my minimal setup.

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🚀 Why It Matters

This CMS is now becoming the foundation for many of my upcoming projects.
It’s lightweight, open for customization, and helps me ship new ideas faster — exactly how I like to work.

Sometimes building your own tools, even small ones, makes all the difference.

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Written by Radek Venzhöfer
Part of my ongoing journey of building useful digital products and automations.