Wordpress to Hugo

Wordpress is arguably the most prolific blogging platform. It’s actually more than that really. It’s a full-featured CMS and while it has its uses, I’ve fallen out of love with all the overhead of just keeping a simple blog going. This is the first post written on Hugo, a static site generator written in Go.

I’ve decided to leave a dynamic CMS in favor of a simpler solution that fits my workflow of a software engineer better.

I don’t need:

• Expensive hosting
• To deal with PHP
• To deal with security around MYSQL
• To manage a software stack for a simple blog

I do like:

• Markdown
• Fast websites
• Low cost
• Open source (Wordpress falls into here too)
• Using the same tools as my normal dev workflow
• Learning something new (in this case Go and Go templating)

Using Hugo requires a bit upfront work to get things deploying automatically, but once that is setup, my blog is deployed with a simple git push. I used Wercker as suggested on Hugo’s official site. It even supports Docker out of the box! So this project alone has let me touch a bunch of new areas and now I can focus on writing content.

My wife has a food blog, chocolateandcarrots.com, where she needs to deal with users, comments, nested taxonomies and a simple UI for managing her content, so she’ll stick with Wordpress for now.