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Anecdata: I have semi-recently converted a couple of Wordpress and also Docuwiki sites to static sites. First with Hugo, then converted again from Hugo -> Jek

Anecdata: I have semi-recently converted a couple of Wordpress and also Docuwiki sites to static sites. First with Hugo, then converted again from Hugo -> Jekyll. I could not be happier with the results (...with Jekyll anyway, less so with Hugo). And there is no npm. The biggest problem for me was mentioned in the article - security. It felt like I was frequently having to babysit updates in Dokuwiki and Wordpress. Both of the update procedures felt precarious and dangerous - more than once they'd fail to update and hose something on the server and I'd need to go in with a SFTP client or SSH and try to rectify whatever the hell happened. I grew to fear the updates and started to procrastinate doing them which was a warning sign. Perhaps they are perfect and flawless these days? And even when I had updated there was always this lingering feeling that there was some unknown/unpatched exploit or I was 12 hours too late patching and so someone was "inside" my wordpress running a spam/phishing operation without me knowing (happened to me, but perhaps 15 years ago now and was due to the hosting provider so not really relevant... I only found out about that one when a victim of the phishing operation did a whois on the domain and sent me threatening messages. Nice.) These sites that were on Wordpress/dokuwiki didn't even need to be "dynamic" anyway - they just needed to serve content and provide a simple way for people to edit the content. Github pages does a great job for this - non-tech users just use the in-browser editor and if they accidentally delete something there is the git changelog. The time "lost" to do a one-time compilation of the site is totally paid back by the near instantaneous loading time compared to the bloated feel of the previous sites waiting for PHP+MySQL to do its thing on some VPS or shared host (I did not have a CDN).

nsomaru 6y ago
Why not run Wordpress locally and bake the site out to static files? That way you get Wordpress content authoring and all the advantages of a static site you mention
- shiftpgdn 6y ago
  IMO this is the perfect middle ground where you need non technical people to make rapid edits to a live website. They can make edits to a dev/local environment which automatically get baked out and pulled into the live site on a set schedule.
- cornell532 6y ago
  This is exactly what we do using Shifter (http://getshifter.io/ http://getshifter.io/).
  - johncozen 6y ago
    Thank you for sharing Shifter. I’ll check this out. I work on a lot of Wordpress and GatsbyJS so a simpler path to static sites from a WP admin is something I’ve been looking for.
ValentineC 6y ago
Curious: why did you move from Hugo to Jekyll?
- mattlondon 6y ago
  I just found that with Hugo it was really hard to get exactly what I wanted in terms of directory structure and theming. E.g. just getting a simple child page listing at "domain.com/something/" to automatically list all child pages took hours and hours and I still couldn't get it to work. It literally had a blank page. It felt over-engineered and they'd crow about speed improvements or some niche new whizz-bang feature or whatever for their new releases when I was there still just trying (and failing) to get what I feel is a totally fundamental basic feature working. I also found creating a custom theme from scratch in Hugo quite complicated with archetypes or whatever they were called. It felt like the project was more interested in the engineering challenge of the site generator rather than making something that is usable (which is totally 100% fine for them to choose that path) - after all directory listings seems like a basic feature to me yet it was apparently impossible without considerable fiddling around with _index files or other custom nonsense. Everything just felt a little bit more complex and laborious than it should have been to get a simple 4 or 5 layer site up and running exactly the way I wanted it. I am sure that if I kept at it and kept trawling the support forums and posting questions and hanging out on IRC someone could have helped me ... but life is too short for that and I've got things to do so it just wasn't worth fighting with. Jekyll on the other hand is super-simple and I was able to port entire sites - complete with a from-scratch custom theme + CSS - in under a day, and have them look and act exactly how I wanted. I only picked Hugo over Jekyll originally as at the time I was a fan of golang, so I was not really that wedded to Hugo for another reason.
scarecrowbob 6y ago
I feel the same way about Moodle as you do about DocuWIki... it's brittle, and the updates aren't semvar-- a minor verions upgrade could ereally hose you. But with WP, the WP 5.5 thing where they killed the automatic jQuery migrate inclusion was about the only time in the last year or so when I was caused serious problems by an update (for context, I manage around 500 WP installs for gov/large businesses and a univeristy). There was a pretty bad security issue with a popular file manager plugin, but we council folks to stay away from those solutions anyhow. I feel like in general the ecosystem has gotten a lot better about the update system.
readlikeasloth 6y ago
Just did the other way last month from jekyll -> hugo after years on jekyll. Compile times down from 30 seconds to 300ms. Also was not able to reinstall jekyll with lots of ruby related errors and my knowledge of ruby is close to zero.

nsomaru 6y ago

Why not run Wordpress locally and bake the site out to static files? That way you get Wordpress content authoring and all the advantages of a static site you mention

shiftpgdn 6y ago
IMO this is the perfect middle ground where you need non technical people to make rapid edits to a live website. They can make edits to a dev/local environment which automatically get baked out and pulled into the live site on a set schedule.
cornell532 6y ago
This is exactly what we do using Shifter (http://getshifter.io/ http://getshifter.io/).
- johncozen 6y ago
  Thank you for sharing Shifter. I’ll check this out. I work on a lot of Wordpress and GatsbyJS so a simpler path to static sites from a WP admin is something I’ve been looking for.

ValentineC 6y ago

Curious: why did you move from Hugo to Jekyll?

mattlondon 6y ago
I just found that with Hugo it was really hard to get exactly what I wanted in terms of directory structure and theming. E.g. just getting a simple child page listing at "domain.com/something/" to automatically list all child pages took hours and hours and I still couldn't get it to work. It literally had a blank page. It felt over-engineered and they'd crow about speed improvements or some niche new whizz-bang feature or whatever for their new releases when I was there still just trying (and failing) to get what I feel is a totally fundamental basic feature working. I also found creating a custom theme from scratch in Hugo quite complicated with archetypes or whatever they were called. It felt like the project was more interested in the engineering challenge of the site generator rather than making something that is usable (which is totally 100% fine for them to choose that path) - after all directory listings seems like a basic feature to me yet it was apparently impossible without considerable fiddling around with _index files or other custom nonsense. Everything just felt a little bit more complex and laborious than it should have been to get a simple 4 or 5 layer site up and running exactly the way I wanted it. I am sure that if I kept at it and kept trawling the support forums and posting questions and hanging out on IRC someone could have helped me ... but life is too short for that and I've got things to do so it just wasn't worth fighting with. Jekyll on the other hand is super-simple and I was able to port entire sites - complete with a from-scratch custom theme + CSS - in under a day, and have them look and act exactly how I wanted. I only picked Hugo over Jekyll originally as at the time I was a fan of golang, so I was not really that wedded to Hugo for another reason.

scarecrowbob 6y ago

I feel the same way about Moodle as you do about DocuWIki... it's brittle, and the updates aren't semvar-- a minor verions upgrade could ereally hose you. But with WP, the WP 5.5 thing where they killed the automatic jQuery migrate inclusion was about the only time in the last year or so when I was caused serious problems by an update (for context, I manage around 500 WP installs for gov/large businesses and a univeristy). There was a pretty bad security issue with a popular file manager plugin, but we council folks to stay away from those solutions anyhow. I feel like in general the ecosystem has gotten a lot better about the update system.

readlikeasloth 6y ago

Just did the other way last month from jekyll -> hugo after years on jekyll. Compile times down from 30 seconds to 300ms. Also was not able to reinstall jekyll with lots of ruby related errors and my knowledge of ruby is close to zero.