Video download link | md5sum 9f82b77961c381c0399b85dc91d26a27 New Static Page Generator Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0



Summary: What the future of this site might look like, at least in sections that shall be managed without a bloated/cluttered front end and a bloated back end (with or without caching) that are a burden to maintain

THE version of WordPress that we love will run out of support (as in, security patches) some time soon, as per this statement from eight days ago. We've already explained (nearly a decade ago!) why we won't upgrade to future branches. We're sure some people will offer unofficial patches, backported to plug very critical holes. But such patches are risky and unpredictable. They're not a long-term solution but a temporary lifeline.

Back in July we started working on our own Content Management System (CMS) or Static Page Generator. It was deployed to Tux Machines later in the same month (as "testing") and went "live" last month. We're hoping to do the same with Techrights, but there's no timeline/deadline set in stone. Probably some time this coming winter. We're currently working on the search facility, followed by basic stuff like archiving. The CMS already supports 3 or 4 different protocols, not just HTTP/S. Because it is very simple and lightweight (written mostly in Bash and Perl, plus peripheral libraries) it's very simple to shape it into something we want and need, not something that the parent companies of WordPress and Drupal are pursuing (mostly for business reasons).

The video above demonstrates how new pages are added, updated, and how images get added to them. It's not as hard as it looks; it just takes some training to get into the habit. Debugging is simpler due to the elegance and simplicity of the system. At the back end there's one SQLite database, but it's not accessed by anyone except administrators, who can use it to generate and regenerate existing pages. In terms of performance, it's an amazing improvement over what we had (more than an order of magnitude) and it runs on a very thin distro called Alpine Linux. ⬆