I used Wordpress for about 10 years. In those ten years I produced 72 posts. Most of these posts were about audaxes or travels I made. During the travels I made my posts with the Wordpress iOS client application. Which was sometimes a hassle because pictures weren't uploaded reliably and I ended up with missing pictures in my posts.
Also the amount of vulnerabilities either in php or in Wordpress increased. Those weren't patched as frequently as I would have liked. And furthermore the load of attacks specially on Wordpress components increased over the time.
This post is not a cookbook, there are enough out there for the different parts needed. It's more a report with links to the pages which helped me during the process.
Why Hugo
There are many static site generators out there. The thing most of the generators have in common is that they are based on some frameworks and you end up installing runtimes and frameworks before you can begin to work with the generator itself.
Hugo is a single executable and works out of the box. There are also some themes available to give you a jump start.
The steps
After I'd decided to go away from Wordpress I did some research on the options. During this research I became aware that I could also migrate the existing comments over to static system by using disqus. This is task I completed a few days before the migration.
Using disqus for comments
I did migrate the existing comments to disqus by using the Wordpress plugin which is provided by disqus itself. Within the plugin there is enough information provided to get the migration step quickly done.
After the migration and with the plugin loaded, Wordpress comments are fully substituted by disqus. From that moment one could switch to a static site generator at any time.
Convert the existing posts
To convert posts and pages over to hugo, there exists also a plugin. I tried it out but got no sufficient result. But hugo itself has an jekyll importer built in. So I went with a plugin which exports everything necessary to jekyll and imported the jekyll files to hugo.
The result worked out of the box. Only some images were nested in ugly html which I converted to markdown by some emacs keyboard macros which were made in seconds. I kept the images in their directory structure which was provided by Wordpress. Although for new posts I took the hugo approach and put the images into the static directory.
Stage everything locally
With my content ready in markdown I was ready to built up my site locally. Hugo has a server built in which allows to see instantly any changes made to content or configuration. I picked the nice Icarus theme to work with. It has disqus support, categories and it matches somehow the theme I used with Wordpress.
The only caveat here is, be careful with the use of disqus locally. I ended up
with pages located at http://localhost:1313 cluttering my disqus
dashboard. The hugo documentation helps with this. In the section Conditional
Loading of Disqus Comments it is explained how to change the responsible
partial.
Bring it to the server
After everything was running fine locally, the next step was to bring it to the server. My Wordpress installation was running on Apache. This Apache server does serve some other things like my trac installation and my WebDAV so I went with this and applied only the needed configuration and stripped all the php things because they were not needed anymore.
Commit only source files
Simply copying the generated files to server would not have suited my workflow because in this case I would not have been able to post from an iOS device. An better approach for me was to store only the source files in a git repository and to build everything on the server itself. Ideally after each push to the server. This can easily be done by making use of git-hooks. In this case a receive-hook for which I found a great example from Bradley Falzon.
Posting from iOS
Having this all setup the only things which are needed to create new posts or edit existing posts are: an editor and a git client. Those are also available for iOS, of course. I tried out Git2Go but it worked not reliable for me and Working Copy, which is great for me. As an editor I had already Byword installed but as I learned that Editorial has support for Working Copy I switched over.