From Hugo to WordPress

I have been blogging with static site generator Hugo for 5 months. Recently, I decided to ditch Hugo and migrate to WordPress.

Here is my story: From Hugo to WordPress.

This is an amicable parting! I have to say that Hugo is an awesome static site generator. I enjoyed the experiences with it when building the first version of this blog and published the first few posts.

I’ve no reason to keep you on one system over another. Just want to respond to one of your complaints:

  1. Cannot write anytime, anywhere. When I find a typo on my phone, I need to correct it right away.

Although this isn’t built into Hugo, there are content management systems which allow you to achieve this, the most popular being https://forestry.io and https://netlifycms.org.

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Neither do I (but I did the switch the other way). And to respond another of OP complaints:

  1. Markdown is limited . e.g, I don’t know how to create a link that opens in a new tab (generating <a> with target="_blank" ).

Did you investigate Markdown Render Hooks? Works beautifully, see eg.
https://github.com/martignoni/blog.martignoni.net/blob/master/layouts/_default/_markup/render-link.html.

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In your linked article you seem unaware of various features that would solve your problems.

Learning new software requires time and patience. If one is unwilling to do the above of course there are other solutions for non-technical users.

And by the way in the Requesting Help guidelines we do state that Hugo:

is not meant to be a “magic wand” to suddenly give you a published website a la Square Space or Wordpress.

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WordPress allows me to spend more time and efforts on writing.

WordPress for sure has benefits. But for a proper comparison I think you also need to consider security + the time and effort that takes.

For instance, your blog has WordPress’ xlmrpc feature enabled, which can be a security risk. So this needs additional work to disable, search and find the proper plugin, or configure the server software properly.

Also, your server software uses nginx/1.14.2, which came out in December 2018 and is already a legacy version (not supported anymore). The newest version is 1.18 so you might want to spend some time updating that too.

These are just two examples of things you need to manage and stay on top of with WordPress, but are often not relevant with Hugo.

There’s also the need for a good backup system of not only your content but server database and configuration too. Plus of the theme and plugins, because auto-updates are nice until they break something and you need to roll-back (or if you made custom changes updating isn’t easy anymore).

Writing in rich text is just much more intuitive than plain text markdown, even though I am very proficient at Markdown.

It sounds to me more like you’re missing a good text editor rather than dislike static site generators. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Thanks all for the suggestions!

Especially @funkydan2, who taught me headless CMS, which is now the next thing I will explore. I will re-evaluate this approach. WordPress or Hugo is certainly a false dilemma.

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