From WordPress to Hugo

I have used self-hosted WordPress for this blog since its start in 2006, but I finally got fed up with having to frequently update WordPress itself and a bunch of plugins, or having to constantly worry about security issues. Since I am the only one publishing on this blog, I decided to switch to a static site generator instead, and I chose Hugo, mainly because it is easy to install and does not require any heavy runtime (most of its competitors require Python, Ruby or Node.js).

I used this tool to export the WordPress site to Hugo format. I had to do some tweaks to get it to work properly:

• Convert HTML’s <pre>...</pre> to Markdown’s ``` format (beware of line breaks after/before).
• Remove some HTML escaping such as < and >.
• Clean-up some <p>, </p> and <br /> tags.
• Put any static content into static directory, and fix links to it.
• Move pages to content.
• Fix temporal archives with a script like this:

#/bin/bash

for file in `ls -1 |grep '^[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9]-'`; do
  year=`echo ${file} | sed 's|\([0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]\)-\([0-9][0-9]\)-\([0-9][0-9]\)-.*|\1|g'`
  month=`echo ${file} | sed 's|\([0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]\)-\([0-9][0-9]\)-\([0-9][0-9]\)-.*|\1/\2|g'`
  day=`echo ${file} | sed 's|\([0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]\)-\([0-9][0-9]\)-\([0-9][0-9]\)-.*|\1/\2/\3|g'`
  sed -i -e "1d" ${file}
  sed -i -e "1i day: ${day}" ${file}
  sed -i -e "1i month: ${month}" ${file}
  sed -i -e "1i year: ${year}" ${file}
  sed -i -e "1i ---" ${file}
done

• Add search with Pagefind.
• And some more.

The source code for the blog is now on GitHub.