From Dotclear to Eleventy 1

Introduction

When I moved to Holland in 2006, I started a blog to give news and share my discoveries. It was simply called me in Amsterdam and ran on a specific CMS called Dotclear that was very popular in France at the time. Same as wordpress, it uses PHP and a MySQL database and allowed me to edit posts with a wiki syntax and in a simple interface.

Unfortynatly, this is blog is the last site I maintain this way and it becomes difficult to cope with a specific syntax where everywhere else I use Markdown. Also the high maintainance database started to give me headhackes so it is time to find a new solution.

Since I am not in Amsterdam any more, I could decide to archive the pages as they are as I did for more efemeral blogs. But this time, I wanted to keep the blog alive as I still write a post every now and then. Having recently redesigned my personal site with eleventy, I aimed to do the same with this blog and its 700 posts.

What I keep and what I drop

Media managment (change)

Most CMS organise content with media and images on one side and text and articles on another side, picking images from a repository that grows as you write. Because the repository was too big, I had to create folders by years then by month to be able to keep up woith growth amd even by topic to manage some of the contributions.

With that experience, I decided to manage images in a more logical way, along with the posts using them. This way they follow the organisation of posts which are sorted in folders by year and month.

Comments (drop but keep)

Static sites are not good at collecting and displaying comments but since nobody leaves comments on (my) blogs for several years this is not a feature I will fight to keep. Although I'd like to keep the past comments online because some were very informative and other where very funny.

Deciding to drop comment capability was the obvious choice. The way to manage archiving of the previous comments was more tricky. It should still possibly keep all dates and reference including the gravatar picture that some users were displaying with their comments.

Also I still don't know what I will do with people who left their email to be notified when a new comment appears on the blog. I may send them a card of my new blog for Christmas.

Tags and categories (keep)

Tag clouds and categories are not trendy any more but they help SEO with linking pages on the same topic so I'd rather keep them. All these extra pages were generated automatically with dotclear. This can be done with eleventy too but it will have to be correctly set.

An interface to edit posts (keep)

It is possible to use eleventy with user firendly interfaces to edit each post. I would like to still have it possible because this can come handy but I am quite sure I'll be more confident editting the markdown files directly in my IDE.

Pagination (keep)

Pagination still needs to be here for posts, categories and tags as this is the only way I can find back all articles.

URL rewriting (keep)

At first my posts were accessible with a url nesting the year month and title the old fashion way (i.e. /2006/03/demenagement-en-photos) but I quickly changed it to remove the dates and I would like to keep these urls how they are with the possibility to write the slugs myself. Again this Dotclear feature is also available with eleventy so I won't struggle with this.

Search (keep)

Search might be more complicated. On dotclear it was using the power of the database which is not be carried over. Fortunatly the eleventy community shared several solutions that can bring back this feature in a different manner.

Design (keep)

I don't want to completly change the graphical design but the way pages are made with several generations of HTML and css can be improved. So I intend to redesign the pages from scratch hoping it will make them lighter. If I can make it nicer on the way I won't refrain from it.

Oh and I'd like to foccus on accessibility too. I was not thinking about it when I started my blog but now I think it is important to think about it. Always.

In terms of structure design, I want to keep all the main navigation, pagination, tagging and extra footers that I was using so far.

Analytics and advertising (dropped)

Yes I had attempts to monetise my blog with banners and various ads. I added facebook and twitter links, flicker widgets, trackers to generate nice analiytic graphs. With time I removed most of it but I wouldn't be surprised if there remain bits of these toxic codes here and there. I do not intend to add them back.

I still care about visitor trends, what pages are visited and further what pages cause 404 errors but I learned to rely on the server logs for this so AWStats is sufficient for my needs here.

Conclusion

You get it, appart from comments I want it to remain the same blog.

Having worked with 11ty, I have the feeling this is possible and not too complicated. I'll write later on about the progress of this migration in order to keep track of this experience and the possible issues I faced.