blog-redesign

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This page is to keep track (project management) of a 2024 microformats.org blog redesign including moving from WordPress to something based on static files in order to drastically reduce admintax and potential for future vulnerabilities/compromises.

Goals

Preservation:

• All existing blog posts remain
• Ideally at their existing permalinks, or at least redirecting from current permalinks to new permalinks
• Preserve custom inline HTML and styles in blog posts
• Preserve existing styling and presentation of blog posts and aggregation pages in general

Future:

• Able to add new blog posts occasionally (this only happens around once a year at this point)

Maintenance:

• As little dynamic server code as possible to reduce the chances of vulnerabilities

Non-goals

• Another dynamic CMS that requires frequent software updates
• Redesigning the look and feel of the blog
• Preserving WordPress user accounts / identities (ok to replace with another identity system, IndieAuth, GitHub etc.)

Types of pages

Pages (URLs) to preserve:

• Blog top level index: https://microformats.org/blog
• 99 blog post permalinks: e.g. https://microformats.org/2022/02/19/how-to-consume-microformats-2-data
• Month pages: e.g. https://microformats.org/2018/06
• Tag pages: e.g. https://microformats.org/tag/microformats2

Options

Static site generator built on GitHub Actions

• Port the site to some sort of SSG that can be built on GitHub
• Deploy the static built files to the server

Simple PHP templates

Similar to oauth.net, use simple PHP templating for the pages. (example source file)

• Another solid example from The PHP League, Plates: Native PHP Templates

Static HTML archive

• Archive all pages as static HTML, including month pages and tag pages
• New blog post pages would exist entirely outside of the static archive

Switch entire site to MediaWiki

• MediaWiki already running at /wiki; update it to run at /; would need to add redirects so existing wiki permalinks keep working
• Port blog posts into wiki pages (may be issues preserving custom inline HTML and styles in blog posts?)

General Checklist

Before decommissioning our WordPress install:

• [ ] make a list of WordPress user accounts
• [ ] determine which WordPress user accounts belong to admins and find their equivalent GitHub usernames
• [ ] determine which accounts belong to blog post authors, and find their equivalent personal site to credit instead (and ideally their GitHub handle to credit wherever the raw post content is moved to)
• [ ] ...