A Little More on the Hugo Transition

So far, with the help of a few scripts (both bash and Python) I’ve been able to get most of the site back up to the way I want it to be. Most of the images should be working now. I still have to create and run another script for the way that this theme wants cover images to be references. I think that does bring to light one of the annoyances with Hugo vice Wordpress. When it comes to themes, each one expects things to be organized differently. It is much more chaotic than WP. Perhaps the type of person who runs Hugo is more likely to roll their own theme? Or will pick one and not change until they abandon their blog?

A few things I want to figure out include surfacing the categories and tags on the blog posts like Wordpress has. Also, seeing if I can figure out how to get a related posts plugin or feature working.

There’s definitely a bit of a feeling of going back to a simplicity of when I used to create pages with raw HTML, but not quite that daunting.

One of my favorite podcasts, The Open Source Security Podcast, covered the Wordpress mess in their most recent episode. It’s a good bit of back and forth about how bad things are coupled with wondering if anyone will care or change their CMS. There isn’t a true equivalent yet, and any fork would have to maintain its own plugin repo.

This brings me to the final thing I wanted to cover - just what exactly is going on with Wordpress. I linked to an Ars Technica story yesterday, but since link rot is a very real problem, here’s a summary: Suddenly Matt Mullenweg (one of the Wordpress creators and CEO of Automattic) decided that WP Engine shouldn’t be able to use Wordpress’ good will any more and started making a big stink about trademarks. However, until recently the trademark permissions for Wordpress were very open. Additionally, they locked WP Engine out of the Wordpress.org plugin repos. One of the things that made me very wary was the Elon Musk-like ultimatum that any employees that didn’t like this could take severange and leave. It’s also been very confusing to me the way that Wordpress.org and Wordpress.com are run and the Ars Technica article (and others) have pointed out that it’s a little shady and they are both owned or run by Matt.

I may still go back to Wordpress if I decide that this Hugo process is a little too annoying, but for now I’m enjoying a somewhat simpler system that doesn’t rely on a database and all kinds of complications. I may even see if I can run it out of Digital Ocean’s site builder. (Unless my repo would be too huge because of all the images)

• Hugo
• Wordpress