Move from WordPress to Pelican

2018-03-11T22:15:24-04:00

I have been playing with the thought of moving my blog from WordPress to a static website generator for years.

I never really had the energy to start this projects, for several reasons. I know I could never find a theme that is completely to my liking so I would have to change it, possibly altering some code. There were some generator written in PHP, my language of choice for a long time, but they seemed not very mature. The best known static web site generator was Jekyll, written in Ruby and I really couldn’t get the energy to start learning Ruby on the side. The other reason that was keeping me from moving was how to move all my articles from WordPress to the static generator.

I started working for ONeil Interactive in 2017. We build websites for the home building industry and the language of choice is Python. We started looking into building an internal site for documenting our projects. We develop in Python and it was quickly decided the static generator should be written in Python as it would make it easier to extend the generator if needed.

As a result of this project I decided to bite the bullet for my personal site as well. After a quick look at the site StaticGen and some quick research I decided to go with Pelican. Of course I needed a theme, and there is never a theme that completely satisfies my needs but my starter theme is Plumage by Kevin Deldycke. I’ve modified it to work with Bootstrap 4, and used the Slate theme by Bootswatch.

I only moved two articles from my old blog as the rest of the articles were not visited that often. I still have them in the database so if it’s ever needed I can pull them up.

Oh in case you were wondering, for the project at work we decided to go with MkDocs

A Virtual Home - python

Move from WordPress to Pelican