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)

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?)