Here I want to describe the whys and hows of my switch from Wordpress to Pelican. Although I know, that there are already some resources on this topic (google #1 google #2) maybe someone wants to hear my story too.
Why
Since the beginning, I wasn't 100% happy with wordpress. It fulfilled my needs, because it was easy to setup, had commenting, code highlighting, rss feeds and some other features I require from a blog. But this was it.
Wordpress lacks the following:
- code seems to have security issues - is targeted frequently by bots
- code seems to be badly written (I just looked once because an addon made problems)
- since plugins are installed by php and wordpress is autoupdated, I never started to put it into git (with the result, that I never changed the theme or wrote my own plugin)
- backend isn't easy to use: I like my vim I don't like/understand their syntax
- their codehighlighting possibilities suck so I ended up with github's gist which make my workflow more complicated
- uploading images/files also made the workflow quite complicated so I made it quite seldom
What I always wanted:
- something with text files so I can use: vim and git
- something static since a blog is 99% static + comments from users
- something which I easily can modify and extend
So I stumbled over pelican and was amazed, that there exists something which I wanted, but which is more than just plain text files.
There seem to be many blog-systems like pelican and the number one reason for people to use it is, that it is popular, has good documentation and allows to import from wordpress.
How
Basically I used their importer and converted it to markdown (rst is the default but markdown sounds be better.
Since I used a special code-plugin I had to manually edit the markdown files and add the code.. Which wasn't much because I hadn't written so much yet, but which also wasn't a pleasure.. part of the problem is the way the database handled this code.. Because it was in no way normalized and so I couldn't do it with easy sql/text processing.
Another problem were my 2 images, which I also had to download, because the pelican-import just kept the absolute url to those files.
And at last, I had to look at the configuration, plugins and themes. My first impression, is that it is very easy to write plugins (I needed a modified gist-pelican-plugin and it was easy to read and modify). Also the styling looks quite simple.
Conclusion
The migration took 3h until now. I still need to copy the comments to disqus or something similar and make sure, that everything works and looks alright.. and maybe I should add some page-forwards.
Also I noticed, that adding links to blogposts is now 100% easier since I don't have to write
<a href=".." target="_blank">..</a>
like I did in wordpress :).
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