10 Years Ago (2013-10-31) We Said We'd Leave WordPress and We Finally Did It (After a Decade with LTS Versions, Whose Support Ended Months Ago)
THE new static sites (yes, plural; there are two of them; all the GNU/Linux news goes into Tux Machines now) are run and maintained using simple tools, coded in Perl with some Bash wrappers. It's easy to lose track/sight of how large these sites are, but it's safe to say we produced close to 15,000 pages using these tools so far. The exact number isn't important. 15,000 is only about 5% of the total anyway (older material going back to 2004).
Development of the software isn't new; it's going back to last summer (2022) and emanated from a need and decade-long desire to abandon WordPress, then adopt Drupal or something else (later on Drupal made the same mistakes). As I wrote 10 years (10 years minus one day): "The transition can be slow, but we're determined to make it happen."
As slow as 10 years.
This was back in the days of the on 3.x series of WordPress. We never went beyond that version, but security patches for it ended several months ago, furthering the need if not urgency to move on.
Looking back, we are very gratified about the move. No more MariaDB/MySQL to look after; no more "short downtime" while we export/dump a database (nightly backup), spilling about 10 GB of text to a file every day. Enough of that! Simple is beautiful. █