Officially, this is the first blog post I have ever written in Blush. Well, technically, I have been writing in it for over three years now. But, I only recently came up with a real name for the project.

Blush is a PHP-based, flat-file CMS that I have been developing since late 2018. OK, well, maybe not actively developing that entire time. It’s more like I built the bulk of it over a weekend and just fixed stuff along the way.

It has gone through a few iterations in that time. But, as any programmer can tell you, naming the thing you have built is the toughest part. The 2018-era name was probably not PC. I never liked it anyway. Then, I had the perfect name somewhere between then and now, but another software developer beat me to it in the same CMS/framework space.

After a brainstorming session that managed to spread itself across several weeks recently, I landed on Blush. I’ll dive into the “why” behind that name down the road.

I figured it was finally time to share it with the world. I mean, really share it with the world (technically, the source code has been public since I started using it). I had the name. It was finally time.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been holed up in the lab, rewriting most of the original code from scratch. Much of the work consisted of implementing ideas I haven’t gotten around to in the last few years. Some of it was new stuff that I have learned as a programmer or just new things I picked up in the last few days.

Today, I am proud to announce version 1.0.0-alpha. No, not even a beta yet. But, I’m shipping something.

For those who want to give it a whirl, install the Blush repo via Composer. If you just want to check out the underlying code for the framework/CMS, see the Blush Framework.

I am certain that I will be writing more about Blush in the coming weeks and months, perhaps even launching a separate website.

I had planned to write more about the alpha launch, but a three-hour session of dealing with broken caching pushed my plans back. I’m barely getting this thing launched within the weekend before the real world comes knocking on the door in the morning.