The Jekyll migration cheat sheet (make #3)

Jekyll is a static site generator. It allows you to run a blog on a minimal server with minimal security worries and no spamming. Because it’s all based on files, it tends to be a bit more technical than blogging in WordPress. I’ve previously written about Jekyll, but now it was time to actually migrate a site from WordPress to Jekyll.

For those who are following, this is make #3 of the 2016 maker challenge. There are at least two more ideas for more makes in this post. Let me know if you want to team up 🙂

Last month, I migrated the marketing site of my old side project, FCTR.be.

  1. Everything combined, it took me about 8 hours, spread over 2 weeks. If you do this in one go, it will be quicker.
  2. Finding a theme was the major hurdle. The community is much smaller. Even if you want to pay, the options are limited. (Some one should create a WP theme to Jekyll converter)
  3. Migrating content, even custom post types was smooth.
  4. Square bracket special tags that are used by images and some plugins, were not automatically converted and had to be adapted manually.
  5. Jekyll itself is well documented. The template language Liquid also has ok documentation. The interaction between the two was not-so-well documented.
  6. Permalinks in Jekyll are very flexible. I didn’t need to create any rewrites.
  7. Pagination in Jekyll is messy. Unless you start developing a Ruby plugin, you can’t page by category or tags. Because there are a limited number of posts on the site, I resorted to a client-side jQuery plugin.
  8. Free hosting on GitHub has limitations that you may not want to live with.
  9. Why isn’t there a desktop or web app that wraps Jekyll in a nice UI? It’s dirt cheap to host and scale Jekyll sites.
  10. Here’s an overview of the migration process (click for full size):

Wordpress to Jekyll Migration