After 10 happy years as a WordPress user, yesterday I switched my site over to pelican.

WordPress is awesome I'd recommend it to anyone, however over the last year I've become increasing frustrated with my sites stability; I've been pretty pleased with the average response time but it wouldn't take much to exhaust my cloud servers CPU. (I've tried pretty much every caching technique and couldn't find a perfect fix)

For anyone else that is embarking on this transition and having issues with pelican-import, I advise opening your posts.xml in Vi scroll through and look for any dodgey looking characters and remove them.

Making my new pelican site look "exactly" like my old site has been a labour of love so I have published some of my fixes online.

FEED URLS

In WordPress I had pretty URLs for Feeds like /feed, /feed/atom and /tag/security/feed. I found that feeds were limited to files in Pelican and did not support a nested structure. To fix this I have proposed a pull-request on github, I guess we'll see if it gets accepted.

URL Rewriting

This Pelican is a bit of an experiment to ease regression I want to leave my WordPress config completely untouched, therefore I have migrated from Apache to Nginx. I've not used nginx before, so it's been a bit of a learning curve if you're having problems with rewriting maybe my config can help?

Theme

The pelican LINICKX theme is now based on bootstrap.

Pelican Config

Tying it all together, nginx, pelican, etc takes a little effort... example pelicanconf.py and publishconf.py are on github.

To Do

There's still loads for me to fix, I've replaced all teh [gallery] tags but I know there's plenty of [caption] tags to remove.
I haven't yet worked out how I'm going to handle image resize/upload in a neat and tidy way, in fact my whole write & publish workflow needs a bit of thought. BUT this first pelican post, written in atom has gone well, so only time will tell!