This post details the development of a Python microservice named “MarkItLikeItsHot,” designed to streamline content conversion into Markdown within Willow CMS. This microservice uses a FastAPI wrapper around Microsoft’s powerful MarkItDown library, enabling seamless conversion of files, URLs, and raw text into clean, formatted Markdown. We’ll explore the underlying technologies, get into the code structure, and highlight key aspects like Docker deployment, testing, and configuration.

Migrations are a tool in CakePHP for managing database schema changes. They provide a version-controlled way to modify your database structure, making it easier to track, share, and deploy changes across different environments or installations of your application. CakePHP has tools to generate snapshots of your database structure and migrations between them. Given that migrations can also execute query language statements on your database, they can also be used to modify data. Willow CMS has evolved through several releases since going live for this site, with some of those releases requiring changes to the database schema and data. In this post I'll talk you through some practical examples of how I handled this.

Willow CMS has officially launched! I've been building Willow CMS for a few months now and it's time to put version 1 into use. Willow offers offers dual editing options with both Trumbowyg Rich Text and Markdown editors, image management capabilities, AI features for SEO optimisation and automatic translation support for 25 languages. In this post I share a video showcasing the Willows interface for publishing pages and blog posts.