Wordpress to Hugo

3-minute read
wordpress • self-host • blog • hugo

Introduction

This journal entry was written by me, Brandon Nolet, in the context that I’m going to be moving my wordpress blog to hugo.

Wordpress Plugins

They say that there’s basically a Wordpress(WP) plugin for everything. There’s no denying that, but that’s not to say that there’s a WP plugin for everything in the plugin repository. In this case, a WP to hugo exporter is not listed in the official plugin repository for WP. The top results when searching hugo are related to email logging, captcha, and a translator.

There’s absolutely nothing related to Hugo the static site generator. The only reason the email logger plugin showed up is because someone named Hugo contributed a translation to the plugin. It’s almost as if the WP developers don’t want you to have the option to move away from WP. It’s understandable, but I don’t think it’s the right approach.

So I’ll be installing the plugin I found manually.

After Manual Installation

For some reason the page that WP would have displayed for exporting to hugo wouldn’t appear, so I just used the command line tool with php to create the converted blog. Then I scp’d the resulting zip down to my home computer and started testing the extracted files with hugo.

The resulting config file seemed to be bunk because I kept getting errors referring to missing taxonomies. So I copied the config file from this blog.

Then I forgot to add a theme, but then once I did add the theme, there seemed to be missing…well…all of the posts. The homepage showed up fine (I used the theme from this blog for testing) but when I went to load the list of posts, I got a 404 not found.

After deleting a few things, I found out that an erroneously placed index.md was the result of no posts being available. After I deleted that, all the posts showed up!

New Theme

Now I have to find another theme for this hugo version of my blog. To make the resulting blog as close to how my old blog looked, I’ll have to find a theme that supports featured images. I want all the nice stock images that I used on the blog to appear in the new version of the blog.

Conclusion

I’m not willing to embark on this journey at this time so I’ll cut this short.

I tried a few themes and many of them seem to either not be building or not using the featured image at all. This is clearly something that’s going to take longer than an hour or so. This will be its own project for sure. Can’t add another project, so I can’t continue.

Sorry for the hastiness in this post.