The Relaunch of The Old West and Why I Chose Vanilla PHP

The Old West in 2026 Two days ago, I relaunched a website that I first set up in 2021 called The Old West. It not only features a new design, but also a lot of new content. The purpose of the website is to consolidate Wikipedia articles about the old American west into one spot, making it easy to browse them. I import the articles into my database using Wikipedia’s API and display them under their Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. The articles are defined in config files and I wrote a script that imports and updates them. The script is run via a cronjob once a week to keep the articles up to date with the latest changes from Wikipedia. A complete rewrite was long overdue as I could no longer build the old website. At the time, I was heavily into React and Next.js which is the technology I chose to power the website. Unfortunately, I also used the Material UI component library which became the main liability. Material UI released a major new update at some point and I…