Welcome to the New CarloFontanos.com

After years of running this site on WordPress, I finally did the thing I kept telling clients not to do on a whim: I threw the whole platform away and rebuilt it from scratch. What you are looking at now is a fully custom CMS and digital product platform built with Laravel - designed, coded and shipped specifically for this site.

Why leave WordPress?

WordPress served me well for a long time, and I still build with it for clients. But for my own site, the setup had drifted into the usual trap: a theme fighting a page builder, a stack of plugins each solving ten percent of a problem, and WooCommerce carrying a full physical-goods checkout for what is, in the end, a simple job - selling ZIP files.

As a developer, the math stopped adding up. Every feature I needed was something I could build leaner myself, and every feature I didn't need was still there, loading on every request. Owning the entire stack means the site does exactly what it should and nothing else.

What's new for readers

• Speed. No plugin overhead, aggressive caching, optimized images and self-hosted fonts. Pages load noticeably faster than the old site.
• Better tutorials. Code blocks now come with proper syntax highlighting and a one-click copy button, and every tutorial shows its difficulty and reading time. Browse them by topic at /tutorials.
• Dark mode. Hit the toggle in the header. The whole site - including code samples - follows along.
• Cleaner navigation. Tutorials, products and the blog each have their own home, with real category pages and a site-wide search.

What's new for the store

This is where the rebuild pays off the most. The new store at /products is built around how digital products actually work:

• Guest checkout. No account required - pay and get your files. Card, Apple Pay, Google Pay and PayPal are all supported.
• Instant delivery. Your download links appear immediately after payment and land in your inbox as a backup.
• Real product pages. Screenshots, feature lists, FAQs and full changelogs, so you know exactly what you are buying and how actively it is maintained.
• Updates that reach you. When I ship a new version of a product, your existing download links serve the latest files - no re-purchase, no hunting for update ZIPs.

Under the hood

For the curious: Laravel 12, MySQL, Tailwind CSS, and a custom admin panel that works the way WordPress should - post types, taxonomies, menus and a media library, minus the parts I never used. No page builders were harmed (or installed) in the making of this site. I will write up the interesting architectural decisions in future posts, because a few of them - like how the download delivery and file versioning work - deserve their own deep dives.

What's next

More tutorials are already in the pipeline, along with new products and updates to existing ones. The best ways to follow along are the blog and GitHub.

A rebuild this size always leaves a loose screw somewhere. If you find one - a broken link, a weird layout, anything - tell me about it and I will fix it fast. Thanks for reading, and welcome to the new site!