Over the past few weeks, we have been working behind the scenes to migrate our website, resulting in the page that you currently have in front of you! Our pages are now generated by the Go-based, open source static site generator Hugo, and are stored on GitHub. All old URLs should continue working as before, but if you run into any missing pages or other issues, please let us know by submitting an issue or contacting us via the channels linked in the page footer.
Until recently, the OBF websites and blog ran on Wordpress, the most common, PHP-based Content Management System, which overall has served us well over the years (and which itself was a migration from the previous MediaWiki-based setup). Beyond the recent governance issues with Wordpress, we also decided to move towards a static site system due to being easier to maintain in the long-term.
Keeping up with the security patches for WP itself, the plugins we used and keeping it compatible with our custom theme required a lot of effort. As a small, all-volunteer-run organisation, we decided that it’s both a better use of our time and more sustainable in the long-term to use a simpler static site generator. Ultimately, the output of the static site generator is just a collection of HTML files that can easily be moved between hosts and are mostly self-contained.
For our use-case, Hugo and its ecosystem have the benefit that wp2hugo provides an easy way to migrate an existing blog from Wordpress to Hugo! Using an XML dump that Wordpress can generate, Hugo can create all the markdown files and even get the necessary static files like images in the right place. If you’re considering moving away from Wordpress, this might be worthwhile alternative to look at!