VeloCMS Setup Guide for Hackers
Developer blogs, technical tutorials, and code-heavy posts — configure VeloCMS for a technical audience that reads in a terminal mindset.
This guide is for developers, security researchers, and technical writers who want a blog that reflects how they actually think — close to the metal, low on decoration, high on signal. VeloCMS ships with themes built around code-first aesthetics and a TipTap editor that handles syntax-highlighted code blocks natively. Here's how to set it up.
Pick the right theme
Two themes stand out for technical content. Brutalist Code is the obvious choice — it's built around monospace type stacks, high-contrast dark backgrounds, and a visual language that says 'this is a place where things get built'. If you want something that looks like it belongs in a terminal emulator, Brutalist Code is your answer. Tech Neon takes a different approach: it keeps the dark aesthetic but adds neon accent colors (green, cyan, violet) that work well if you want the blog to feel a bit more modern and less austere. Both themes prioritize content density over marketing shine, which is what technical readers actually prefer.
Avoid light themes for technical blogs targeting a developer audience — the contrast ratios are wrong for code blocks and the aesthetic signals the wrong thing. Your readers likely have their editors in dark mode; your blog should match that expectation.
Page builder essentials for hackers
Keep the page builder usage minimal. A clean Hero with your tagline (something specific — 'Writing about Rust, distributed systems, and the occasional war story' is better than 'A developer blog'), a Featured Posts grid for your best tutorials, and a Table of Contents block for long technical articles. The Table of Contents block is genuinely useful for 3,000-word deep-dives — it renders as a sticky sidebar on desktop, which lets readers jump to sections without scrolling back to the top. Enable it in the editor via /toc.
Working with code blocks
VeloCMS handles code blocks with Shiki syntax highlighting — 180+ languages supported, themes matched to your site's color palette. Insert a code block with /code, then pick your language from the dropdown. Inline code (backtick-wrapped) renders differently from block code — use it for variable names, command names, and short snippets. Block code is for anything that needs to be copied verbatim or understood as a unit. One thing worth knowing: code blocks are excluded from the SEO and LLM word counts, so a post that's 70% code might score lower than a prose-heavy post of the same length. This is by design — write enough prose context around your code to carry the explanation.
Content strategy for technical blogs
Technical tutorials have a longer shelf life than opinion pieces, and they attract more search traffic. A well-written 'How to set up Nginx as a reverse proxy in 2026' post will still get readers in 2028. Prioritize evergreen tutorials over reactive commentary. That said, 'war story' posts — here's what broke, here's what I learned — consistently outperform pure tutorials in engagement metrics because they're rare and personal. Mix the two: most posts are tutorials, a few are stories.
Posting cadence matters less for technical blogs than for newsletter-style writing. One high-quality tutorial per month is worth more than four shallow posts per week. Technical readers bookmark and share good tutorials; they don't open a developer blog the way they check Twitter. Quality over frequency is the correct tradeoff here.
Plugins to enable
The Reading Time plugin is table stakes for technical content — readers want to know if this is a 5-minute skim or a 30-minute deep-dive. The SEO Schema Extender plugin adds TechArticle JSON-LD to posts tagged with 'tutorial' or 'how-to', which improves how AI search engines categorize your content. If you publish security research, the Mastodon Crosspost plugin is more appropriate for your audience than LinkedIn or Bluesky — the infosec community is disproportionately active on Mastodon. And if you have a niche audience willing to pay for access to draft posts, benchmarks, or member-only retrospectives, enable the membership system with a token like 'Early access to drafts + member retrospectives'.
Migration path
Moving from a self-hosted Jekyll or Hugo blog? VeloCMS has a markdown importer in Admin > Migrate. Your existing posts in front-matter Markdown format can be bulk-imported — VeloCMS converts them into the structured AST format used internally while preserving your publish dates and slugs. Internal links that referenced /posts/slug on your old site will need a redirect rule in next.config.ts if you're using VeloCMS's slug format instead.
Next steps
- Using slash commands in the editor — code block insertion, ToC, and all slash shortcuts
- Understanding SEO and LLM scores — why technical posts need more prose context
- Self-hosting VeloCMS — running the platform on your own infrastructure
- API tokens and webhooks — integrating VeloCMS with your existing dev toolchain