4 years after the last move from Wordpress to Drupal, I’ve re-rolled this site under Hugo, a static site generator. It’s not that the Drupal site was defective, and it ran rather well, only it had one or two flaws that bugged me.
Why not Drupal?
Running on Drupal it was of course picked up by the spammers of the world. As such it was constantly facing attempts to log in and comment. The Honeypot module stopped the spam, Nginx kept out the repeat offenders and various other mechanisms filtered out the noise, but Drupal is still a hefty system to run a relatively light site on.
I say relatively because this site distributes a book, is translated into French and has a few custom coded sections for translation and contact forms. Fortunately all of this turned out to be replaceable.
It just feels better at this point to not have a database or PHP to worry about. No hacks to worry about or corrupted code. Just simple HTML files and a light dusting of scripting and CSS. OK, I’ll admit this framework (‘Kube’) is not as light as possible, but it’s certainly light enough initially. I’ll go through and remove and minify anything that’s not used as time goes on.
Fun parts were exporting the Drupal site (with metadata) into markdown, restoring original URLs to not confuse search engines and categorising posts and content ‘the Hugo way’. Most likely will form part of a short write-up at some point soon!
New service!
Enough about the stack, anyway, let’s talk business! I’ve decided to widen the scope of my services a teensy bit by offering web consultancy from now. The services I offer are focused on businesses who need to improve their site conversions and ranking and aren’t sure how, or who want a new site, static or dynamic. As such I’ll most likely be writing more on the tech front (not that I didn’t anyway) and a little more on the web and marketing in general.
Translation services continue as normal.