Developing GotowySMS.pl: A Custom Platform for SMS Templates

Project Overview

GotowySMS.pl is a specialized platform offering ready-to-use wish texts and SMS templates for various occasions — holidays, birthdays, name days, anniversaries. My role in the development of this project involved creating the layout, designing the front-end, and developing a custom CMS for the back-end. The project is actively maintained and recently went through a deep technology rebuild.

Business Context: Wish Texts and Seasonal Traffic

GotowySMS.pl is not a typical “SMS list” — it’s a library of polished wish texts and occasional messages used mainly by people looking for ready-made content to quickly copy and send. The niche naturally generates a distinctly seasonal traffic pattern — pre-holiday periods (Christmas, Easter, Mother’s Day) bring multi-fold traffic spikes with a narrow conversion window.

That characteristic directly shaped the architectural decisions — the platform has to absorb sudden traffic peaks without putting pressure on the database or back-end.

Layout Design

The first step in developing GotowySMS.pl was designing a layout that would be both visually appealing and highly functional. The goal was to create a clean, modern design that made it easy for users to browse and select SMS templates. The layout was crafted to ensure that all elements, from navigation menus to content display areas, were intuitively arranged, providing a seamless user experience.

Front-End Development

Once the layout was finalized, I focused on developing the front-end layer using modern web technologies. The front-end was designed to be responsive, ensuring that the platform looked great and functioned well on all devices, including desktops, tablets, and smartphones. This was crucial for a service like GotowySMS.pl, where users might need to quickly access SMS templates on the go.

The front-end development also included implementing interactive elements, such as search functionality and category filters, to help users easily find the SMS templates they needed. The design emphasized simplicity and speed, ensuring that users could quickly navigate the site and access content without unnecessary distractions.

Custom CMS Development

To manage the content on GotowySMS.pl, I developed a custom CMS tailored specifically to the platform’s needs. The CMS was designed to be user-friendly, allowing administrators to easily add, edit, and categorize SMS templates. It provided the flexibility to manage a growing database of templates while ensuring that the content remained organized and accessible.

The custom CMS also included features for managing user interactions, such as submitting and rating templates, which helped enhance the overall user experience and engagement on the platform.

Stack Evolution: from Plain PHP to Astro + Laravel 13

The project has gone through three technological phases during its lifetime:

1. Plain PHP (project start). The first version was a classic PHP site rendered server-side — templates began with something like require_once $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']."/config/db.php";, and every subpage hit the database directly on every request. Everything felt heavily over-complicated, and SQL query optimization was a constant topic just to keep the site loading fast enough under real traffic. On the front-end, jQuery and the libraries required by the old Bootstrap were fashionable at the time and piled on extra JS — every kilobyte counted in Lighthouse. The sum of these factors made a full rebuild a more rational choice than yet more patching.
2. InfyOm Laravel Generator. Migrating to InfyOm delivered a productivity jump — the Laravel-based CRUD generator built the backbone of the admin in days instead of weeks. This freed up time to extend the CMS with features that had previously been backlogged.
3. Laravel 13 + FilamentPHP + Astro 6 (current). The latest rebuild separated the layers: Laravel 13 with FilamentPHP as the CMS admin (a polished, consistent admin UI out of the box), Astro 6 as a static front-end consuming content through the API. Supported by Spatie Permissions for editorial roles and Sanctum for API authentication. The panel also exposes redirect management (301/302) directly in the UI — previously every URL change required hand-editing .htaccess, today editors handle it themselves in two clicks, without pulling in a developer.

Architecture: Static Front, Database Only at Deploy Time

The key decision of the current version is generating static pages through the Laravel API during the Astro build. In practice, this means three things:

• User runtime → zero database queries. Every visitor receives pre-rendered HTML from the CDN — even thousands of concurrent requests never touch Laravel or MySQL.
• The database is only hit during build/deploy. When editors add new wish texts in FilamentPHP, a webhook triggers an Astro build → it pulls the latest content from the API → regenerates the static files → ships them to the CDN.
• Seasonal spikes become a non-issue. Scaling reduces to the CDN layer, which is practically unlimited — instead of stressing about database capacity on Christmas Eve, you just watch the traffic graphs calmly.

This approach — static generation from a headless Laravel CMS — is one of the most efficient architectures for sites with cyclically changing content and sudden traffic surges.

End result: the platform runs stably even through holiday spikes, with solid Core Web Vitals — an outcome that would have been hard to reach on the old monolithic PHP stack with jQuery and Bootstrap without aggressive caching and constant worry about server capacity.

Technologies Used

GotowySMS.pl combines a modern static frontend with a custom Laravel-based CMS:

Conclusion

The development of GotowySMS.pl was a comprehensive project that combined creative design with technical expertise. By creating a visually appealing layout, developing a responsive front-end, and building a custom CMS, I was able to deliver a platform that effectively serves its users and meets the client’s needs. This project reinforced the importance of user-focused design and the value of custom-built solutions in creating a successful online service. GotowySMS.pl stands as a user-friendly and efficient tool for anyone in need of quick and ready-to-use SMS templates.