Designing a blog using Angular JS - angularjs

Question

I want to design a blog which will contain several articles. In the home page several tiles will provide links to the articles and when a user clicks on a particular tile with an article's title on it, he will be redirected to a new page having that complete article.
I understand that making a single page application will be of little help in this case.
Will it make sense if I design the whole website using Angular JS? If yes, how should I proceed if I want to design it using Angular JS? Should I avoid using routing since I've learnt that it is primarily used for SPAs, and shall I use $location or something for this instead? Or shall drop the idea of designing using Angular JS at all? Has anyone of you ever designed a multi-page application using Angular JS?
Your guidance will be helpful.

Answer 1

Before identifying the language to use for designing an app, it is important to understand what your app would be doing. In your case, a blog.
and if you analyze the app's functionality, the below three items (there are/could be more but for this use case, these three are sufficient) gain prominence:
Flow
Data
UX
The 1. Flow says that you may not have a SPA but a MPA, which means considering the resources that go into making of the pages, the user experience, it being a blog, a user may not have all that commitment (or patience) to remain with the blog if each click results in a request sent to the server and a heavy duty page served for the user to read through. This means that routes (Express or Angular) are ideal to navigate the user through the blog.
Data
A blog typically contains text and users may perform text search, which means that you need to figure out the right data store for your data ie., text.
This leads you to select the most optimally suited database that is also economical - SQL Server provides for Full text search at a cost of some hefty dollars; MySql does, too, and obviously with no or lesser cost; MongoDb, a document db, gives you the same and with no additional cost (unless you opt for the cloud model). So, SQL Server is not ideal since the app is not (most likely not, being a blog) meant to generate any profits; MySQL is ideal if you use a PHP server and PHP dev; MongoDb is ideal because it enables wrapping the model with the request object thereby, eliminating extensive coding to read the DB and write to the view.
Eg.
(in the router page of the landing Blog page)
var router = express.Router();
var posts = mongoose.model('BlogPosts');
router.get('/get, function(req, res) {
res.json(req.posts); // As simple as this
});
(in the view)
<div ng-repeat="post in infiniteitems">...</div>
(in the controller)
$.ajax({
url: '<url to your route>',
type: 'GET',
dataType: 'json',
success: function(data) {
$scope.infiniteitems=data; // Binds to the controller item in the view
$scope.$apply();
},
error: function() { },
beforeSend: setHeader
});
So, you have the navigation, the view, the data all taken care of with just a few lines of code. More importantly, no innodb or database engine
The code is meant only for explanatory purpose.
Because MongoDB returns a document as JSON and binding a view to a JSON is pretty simple than binding an object or XML values!
Obviously, this means a MVC framework and so AngularJs is the right choice.
UX - Angular Material, when used in conjunction with AngularJS, provides some scintillating designs, colors and animations and the simplicity adds to performance, enhances the UX and renders a freshness to the View (for the user) that is not easily creatable with other technologies.
So, go for Angular.
And also, because MongoDB works pretty well with NodeJS, the whole thing works together which is why they call it the MEAN stack - MongoDB, Express, AngularJS, NodeJS!