From WordPress to Flashboard: A 20‑Year CMS Journey

In 2003, I got into web development to help my mother share her writing.

I was a teenager with a dial-up modem, a head full of curiosity, and enough HTML to be dangerous. I tried a handful of site builders that promised “instant pages," but nothing stuck—until I discovered WordPress. Drag one folder into an FTP client, run install.php, hand my mom the admin password, and watch her words appear on-screen. That moment lit the fuse of a career I didn’t know I wanted. Two decades later, that same WordPress site is still online, and every so often, I log in to keep the gears turning.

As the years rolled on, I explored every CMS I could find—Drupal, Joomla, and a parade of platforms that have since faded into tech history. Each system taught me something, yet every one left me wanting: too complex, opinionated, or fragile once the plugins piled up. Whenever a deadline loomed and a client needed a site they could easily manage, I’d still drag that trusty wp/ folder back into an FTP window because it just worked. It was familiar, quick, and—credit where it’s due—it let non-developers own their content.

When My Stack Outgrew WordPress

Yet, the gap between my day-to-day tech stack and that aging PHP-MySQL world kept widening. I built applications with Rails, React, Remix, and Postgres, deploying to edge networks and querying data in milliseconds. Jumping back into WordPress felt like swapping a sports car for a horse and buggy.

I started cataloging the pain points: the setup rituals, the plugin roulette, the security patches, the database backups. I also tried the flood of “modern” options: headless CMSs, open-source panels, no-code dashboards. At the time, I was the CTO of an e-commerce business, and my data was scattered: orders and products in the store platform, blog content in a separate headless CMS, stock and sales reports locked inside an ERP. The last thing I needed was another silo. Some of those headless systems were powerful but expensive, some were powerful but labor-intensive, and none recaptured the simple magic of that first FTP upload.

Realizing We Were Already Building the Answer

A few months ago, my team and I set out to streamline a different headache: building admin panels. Our projects always needed CRUD screens and internal tools, the same requirements, over and over. We initially launched Flashboard as an instant admin panel for PostgreSQL databases. It wasn’t my dream project, but a great solution for this particular pain point.

The turning point was during a quick sync call. A Twitter friend watched our demo and gave me suggestions about this “CMS we were building.” When that sank in, it hit me: We were building the tool I had been looking for all these years. We reshaped our roadmap and transformed Flashboard into a full-fledged CMS. We’re only a few months into development, but the core already feels right.

Flashboard keeps the qualities I loved about early WordPress: speed to first publish, a front door that editors understand, and the freedom to host on infrastructure I control. Yet it lets you choose your stack, no need to learn a new DSL or get locked into someone else’s rules. Whether my data is a blog post, an inventory item, or a user record, it is stored in a single source of truth and shows up on one login screen away.

Looking Back, Looking Forward

I haven’t migrated my mother’s site yet; it’s a sentimental relic, and part of me likes that it still runs on the tech that started this long journey. But Flashboard finally gives me the tools I've wanted for twenty years, for new projects, and for clients who expect a modern UX and sane maintenance.

If your path echoes mine, if you’ve bounced from platform to platform, chasing that balance of simplicity for authors and power for developers, I invite you to give Flashboard a spin. It won’t replace the nostalgia of that first FTP upload, but it captures the spirit: publish quickly, own your data, choose your stack, and move on to the work that matters.