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. Terminal is the obvious choice — a monospace, green-on-black developer aesthetic beloved by hackers and CTOs alike. If you want something that looks like it belongs in a terminal emulator, Terminal is your answer. Hackerstack takes a different approach: dark navy background with neon-green accents and amber inline code, a Vercel-meets-Linear aesthetic that treats code as first-class content — it works 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 for long technical articles. The Table of Contents plugin (Admin → Plugins) is genuinely useful for 3,000-word deep-dives — it extracts the headings from a post and renders them as a sticky widget readers can use to jump between sections, with numbered, bulleted, or minimal styles and a configurable heading depth.
Working with code blocks
VeloCMS handles code blocks with lowlight syntax highlighting — the common language set (around 40 languages: JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Rust, Go, Bash, and the usual suspects), with automatic detection when you don't pick one. Insert a code block from the slash menu (type / and choose Code Block), then set the language from the dropdown in the block's top bar, or leave it on auto and let the highlighter guess. 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: the SEO and LLM scores count the words inside your code blocks the same as prose, so a post that's 70% code can look 'long' to the scorer while saying very little — 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 FAQ and HowTo JSON-LD when it detects a question-and-answer section or step-by-step instructions in a post, 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 pitch like 'Early access to drafts + member retrospectives'.
Migration path
Moving from a self-hosted Jekyll or Hugo blog? The importer at Admin → Import → Any Site pulls posts from any public site URL — it discovers your posts through the sitemap and RSS feed and extracts each post's content, so it works with Jekyll and Hugo blogs as long as the old site is still online. There's no offline markdown-file importer, so run the import before you take the old site down. Slugs carry over from the source URLs, which keeps most of your old links working — but if your old posts lived under a different path prefix than /blog/, those old URLs won't resolve on their own, so keep the old hosting (or its redirects) alive until you've accounted for them.
Next steps
- Using slash commands in the editor — code block insertion, embeds, and all slash shortcuts
- Understanding SEO and LLM scores — why technical posts need more prose context
- API tokens and webhooks — integrating VeloCMS with your existing dev toolchain