Site Migration Completed

Posted: April 21, 2023 | | Categories: Miscellaneous, Eleventy, Static Site Generators

For fourteen years now, this site ran on the Joomla! Content Management System hosted at FatCow. I migrated the site several times between multiple versions of Joomla! 1x through Joomla! 3x and it was time to migrate to Joomla 4.

Since I started working on this site, I built multiple sites using a variety of other content management systems (CMS) such as WordPress, Drupal, and Concrete 5. I also dabbled with several static site generators, most prominently Jekyll and recently discovered Eleventy.

At this point, I had to make a decision to stick with Joomla! or migrate the site to Eleventy.

Over the years, FatCow became markedly less reliable as a hosting platform with decreased performance, slow technology upgrades, and basic incompatibility with modern CMS. They were acquired at least once, and support deteriorated over time. Due to this I knew I didn't want to keep the site at FatCow.

I also knew that the Joomla! 3.x upgrade to Joomla! 4.x was a real migration. It looked on paper like it would work reasonably well, but with the site being so old, migrated so many times, and with the decreased performance of and at FatCow, it would be doubly hard to migrate it between Joomla! versions as well as hosting providers.

I'd looked at Eleventy a bit, but never got around to building a site on it. I finally got some time to play with it and built a site for my daughter at The Cosplayer's Workshop and I learned that I love it.

I'm a software developer in my core, and I love writing code and figuring out cool and interesting things using code, so the thought of building the exact site I wanted using Eleventy was exciting. I set about creating a new Eleventy project, assembling all of the parts, and building out the site.

If you're reading this post, you're on the new site already. It took me a few weeks to complete the migration, and I built and published a few tools to help others with similar migrations. I'll publish articles about the migration and all of the tools as soon as I can. In the mean time, you're looking at the new site, here's what it used to look like:

This is quite an improved Interface, and should be a lot faster than the old site. I'll also be able to build out some new data-driven areas of the site for my books, articles, GitHub projects, and so on. Stay tuned for more posts about all the things I'm doing here.

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Header image: Photo by Marcos Paulo Prado on Unsplash