After 3 years of using Hexo as my Content Management System for VulpineCitrus, I have finally decided to adopt a more complex system.
I have been looking for decent CMS software for two years, as Hexo had become more of a technical debt than a software I could realistically keep maintaining in shape. Its theme was rewritten by me, and I had received no update to the software since 2019.
While it rendered the entire website into static files based purely on Markdown files, Hexo was getting increasingly abandoned. Furthermore, the nature of its edition meant I could not have a good-looking web interface to edit new pages as I pleased, instead relying on the tedious process of writing a blog post on my local machine running a debug server.
During my investigation I found Grav, which seemed okay: it stores your site as flat markdown files, does not have ridiculously complicated features, and, while it runs on PHP7 at the moment, the developers also seem to take the security of their software very seriously.
Transferring the old blog posts was okay. I took the freedom to edit some old dead links and fix a few issues here and there. Since Grav also uses Markdown files, I could import most of the blog posts. In some of them however, I used Hexo's ridiculously convoluted {% %} block syntax.
As of the writing of this, I haven't yet the reverse proxy of my VPS to point to this site, so it's going to be a slow process. I might not even reverse-proxy it, since Grav does not stray far from the Nginx root directory it's confined to, making it less of a pain to deploy. I do not know either whether the theme for this blog will remain the same. At the moment, I'm still testing things out.
Only time can tell.
And one last time, for the memories: the old VulpineCitrus theme.
