I recently switch this site from Wordpress to Hugo - and the site with Danish content too. It was mostly easy and straight forward, but initially there was a few features missing (by the very nature of it being a static site) and some things I needed to look into once the switch had happened. One of these was a gallery function to present images (photos mostly).

Gallery options….

There are various ways to have a gallery on a site, and one of the pains I had with wordpress, was changing strategies over time, which left me with several plugins needed to handle the historic gallery choices.

Switching to Hugo caused a major change in the workflow behind the site.

Wordpress comes with a full-featured backend which allows you to manage basically your entire website (if it’s Wordpress powered), but Hugo don’t. There’s no-backend admin site nor an webeditor to create and manage your posts. It doesn’t bother me. It’s a completely different workflow and I’m starting with a rough minimum flow initially untill I get a bit more expirence running Hugo.

Going from one CMS to another can be huge challenge - especially as I wanted the various pieces I’ve managed to bring along from the past 20 years along (content from the first years of the site is sadly lost over time).

Getting content out of Wordpress

Getting content out of Wordpress is quite easy. It has a built-in export function and while it took some time, resulting in a large zip file. As Wordpress powers huge parts of the Internet, the export format is well-understood and documented so it only to a little time to find a tool which could do a conversion from the Wordpress export to Marked which is what the Hugo CMS wants.

This site has been running for 20+ years. Most of the years I’ve been using wordpress to post occasionally and have fun messing around.

Wordpress have been a moving target and gained more features through the years. Far more than I ever needed, and to keep simple I’ve decided to move to a simpler setup using the HugoCMS.

Getting to here

One of the benefits of Hugo is, that it’s easy to have it running locally and rapidly let you see changes and update you make to hugo configuraion, themes and content - and I’ve even used it across Linux and MacOS during migation.