As we came into the new year I gave some thought to changing the CMS behind this site from Hugo (its current static website generator) to something else. I’ve been on Hugo continuously now for 4 1/2 years. The alternatives I considered were WordPress, Joomla and Grav.
I migrated the site (sans photos) to each of those three platforms and tried my hand at changing themes and managing general site behaviour.
The reality is I don’t like WordPress very much. The development team seem to have gone out of their way to complicate it. I don’t much like the Gutenberg authoring tool. I’ve also heard reports that, whilst the base system is fairly secure, not so plugins which can harbour significant vulnerabilities.
I then had another try with Joomla. I managed to get most of the pages rendering correctly but I couldn’t figure out how to display categories and tags. I migrated the pages from my current site under Hugo using an RSS feed that produced an xml file. I was then able (after some difficulty) to massage that using LibreOffice Calc into an xml file that the Joomla extension j2xml could read and import. I’ve kept those files in case I return to Joomla one day.
I also had another go with Grav. I could run the site completely using Grav’s built-in local php server, but when I copied it to my domain the posts wouldn’t appear. No idea why. But again I’ve got a full copy of this site in ‘Grav format’ in case it’s ever needed.
So I eventually decided to stick with Hugo. It currently works, it’s all managed/stored on my local computer(s) and is backup up regularly. The posts themselves are saved in cloud storage so are saved in three different locations (computers, cloud, USB drives). It’s not frictionless because I need to be at a computer running Hugo with my theme and modifications, but thankfully I don’t post too often!