I have been using WordPress in some form or another for the last 8 years but it has come time to part ways. I no longer care for anything PHP based as I just do not enjoy having to deal with it. I have been looking for a replacement that will better suit my needs as WP has gained many features that are not targeted at me. Another reason I want to ditch WP is due to the MySQL/MariaDB dependency.

So for the last year I have been kicking around the idea for a replacement platform for a while. I had set up a blog using Ghost, and tinkered with a Djnago based solution. Both still felt like they were too bulky and had too much going on. I just wanted to focus on content. And more of it. Not managing plugins, and themes and making sure I am up to date with the latest security patches.

Static Site Generators

I had been reluctant to investigate this domain of software. I had (wrongly) assumed they just were not for me, required too much configuration, or were going to be a total pain importing my old stuff.

I had heard a lot about Pelican, and a few other static site generators. I stuck to looking at static site generators that were written in Python to make adding plugins and extending the templates trivial as I just don't have the time for things Ruby based. I could have looked at Node.js based apps, however I am still waiting for the Node camp to settle down and mature a bit.

Pelican has quite a few pugins already. Also it supports importing posts from WP as well as other sources. I did run in to a few conversion issues between WP and Pelican but that is partially due to Pelican having a more rigid organization structure of posts and pages compared to WP. Also I use a few WP plugins that make dealing with code and syntax highlighting that caused some issues importing.

I will have to take some time later to clean up the content of the posts but the text is all there. Just not most the links or any images but it is a work in progress and conversion was painless and quick.

Future Plans

I will continue to grow and expand this site, as I add more categories and migrate content from my wiki over. I will start doing more product and service reviews as well as recipes.

The Pelican themes are easy to tweak since they are based on the Jinja2 template library. I also already switched to a bootstrap3 based theme to take advantage of the styling and grid system.

Check back for more!