I’ve been wanting to redesign the layout & theme of this blog for quite some time. It was dated. With the task of developing a custom wordpress theme ahead of me, I looked at other options. Static site generators that use existing templating libraries & markdown sounded like a good way to go, and allowed me to avoid having to learn to create a wordpress theme at the same time. The frontrunners I considered were Jekyll, Octopress & DocPad.
I decided to go with the following: * DocPad for the site generation * Disqus for comments * Zurb Foundation as the base style * Travis-CI for build * Public GitHub Repo fork me :) * Remain hosted where it already is (private server & some AWS plumping)
Although I chose not to use Jekyll, I found Hadi Hariri’s article Migrating from WordPress.com to Jekyll quite helpful in planning out the move to docpad. It gave me a number of things to consider, much of it applying to docpad, including migraing existing content to markdown, which can be consumed almost as-is by docpad. Some manual cleaning up of the html to markdown converted text was required.
Overall the move to docpad was a pretty smooth one, plugins are required to achieve much of the like-for-like behaviour with the wordpress blog that I desired. This included clean URLs with the publish date in the path, tag/category listing pages & generating RSS feeds. Most plugins work as expected with varying options for customising to your liking.
Tweeting links to posts has become a manual task for the moment though… all in good time
