Webcamp KL CMS notes

Firstly I did greatly enjoy Webcamp KL last night. Though I think we need a bigger venue and food/drink next time Wu Han. :)

So Wordpress, Drupal & Joomla were struck off my list for being firstly bloated, probably requiring mysql and full of crappy 3rd party plugins / modules. Hell noes!

A friend Simon Waters comments on this 3rd party nightmare:

Some of what I see is module authors trying to poke too hard, when what they are doing might be better done by extending the system itself rather than as a module. Some of it no doubt is just incompetence. I don't seem to have problems with Drupal plugins in the same way as much, but that might be luck, or it might be that Drupal has so much basic functionality is implemented as modules that the handling of them is more mature?

MongoPress looked interesting, but I thought it looked too fresh to try. It's worringly 26k of PHP with a rewrite coming.

So I'm not your typical CMS user. I don't need a nice interface. I want my content sensibly in git and to generate static content. Much like I am doing already.

Jekyll introduced by Lim of Hacker Monthly fame took my fancy. The problem I have with ikiwiki or suckless's werc is they don't do pagination which I'm a fan of when it comes to navigation.

I'm wondering how easy it is to migrate to Jekyll from my ikiwiki markdown ikiwiki sources to a Jekyll produced site?

yaourt ruby-jekyll and off we go:

==> ruby-jekyll dependencies:
 - ruby (package found)
 - ruby-albino>=1.3.2 (building from AUR)
 - ruby-classifier>=1.3.1 (building from AUR)
 - ruby-directory_watcher>=1.1.1 (building from AUR)
 - ruby-kramdown-last>=0.13.2 (building from AUR)
 - ruby-liquid>=1.9.0 (building from AUR)
 - ruby-maruku>=0.5.9 (building from AUR)
 - ruby-redcloth>=4.2.1 (building from AUR)
 - rubygems (package found)

This takes ages to install on Archlinux. I'm never too sure if I should rely on Archlinux packages or gem... though I would seriously resent having to run gem update --system or whatever it is as well as Arch's yaourt -Syua. I blame MacOSX for having a "non-package" management system.

I do moan about Jekyll dependencies, but I guess ikiwiki's dependencies are just as many. It's just that I don't notice them much when I do a apt-get install ikiwiki.

My first run of Jekyll looks like:

x220:/tmp/foobar$ jekyll 
/usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/custom_require.rb:36:in `require': iconv will be deprecated in the future, use String#encode instead.
WARNING: Could not read configuration. Using defaults (and options).
		No such file or directory - /tmp/foobar/_config.yml
Building site: /tmp/foobar -> /tmp/foobar/_site
Successfully generated site: /tmp/foobar -> /tmp/foobar/_site
x220:/tmp/foobar$ ls _site
ls: cannot access _site: No such file or directory

Er, wtf? Usage docs aren't inspiring me. Need to use YML (urgh), rename my posts to a "YEAR-MONTH-DATE-title.MARKUP", ok... I can do that. Luckily I got unstuck by using some Jekyll site sources.

find ~/wikis/natalian-org.branchable.com/archives -name '*.mdwn' | grep -E '20[0-9][0-9]/[0-9][0-9]/[0-9][0-9]' | while read blog
do
	IFS=/
	set -- $blog
	postname=$(basename ${10} .mdwn)
	dest=./$7-$8-$9-$postname.md
	IFS=""
cat <<END > $dest
---
layout: post
title: $(echo $postname | tr '_' ' ')
---
END
	cat $blog >> $dest
done

Wow, Jekyll has forced me to correct my posture. It's so fast compared to ikiwiki (could be my new SSD though). Pagination works! I like the clean layout.

So far I am very impressed with the output at http://jekyll.natalian.org! :)

Outstanding issues:

Found any of my content interesting or useful?