Building a website mixing static and dynamic techniques

I'm a content creator, maintainer, developer and webmaster of a few websites purely as a hobby.

For cat show photos I wrote a dynamic web application engine based Mojolicious web framework about 12 years ago using Perl programming language.

The site you are currently browsing, heikkisiltala.net, runs on DokuWiki, a PHP-based wiki engine using flat files as a storage system.

DokuWiki is definitely not the most modern wiki engine available. But it is battle tested and very solid. The feature set seems to be comprehensive.

Although I not a fan of PHP language it is very easy to understand and write for anybody who has a programming background.

The flat file based storage system makes it very simple to back up content. It is possible to modify pages as a mass using Linux command line utilities like sed, awk and perl. You can write programs that generate content and all that they have to do is to write the output to text files.

The

Photo galleries used to use a commercial jAlbum software.

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Some of the alternatives are

1. To start using a full-blown CMS
2. To start using a minimal CMS like Grav CMS
3. Write something dynamic, so build my own dynamic site software
4. Use a static site generator software like Jekyll or Hugo
5. Write my own static site generator

The basic requirements for the solutions are

• Should have a minimum of ten years of practical painless lifetime.
• Should be able to migrate all the sites into one simple and unified site.
• Should be able to run both on Windows (workstation) and Linux (workstation, server).
• I have written web content starting from 1994. This should be the last project where I need to convert the content into a new format. In future the web front end changes shouldn't require a content format conversion.

The solution should be able to handle and provide

1. basic wiki-like hypertext content and its navigation
2. a little more complex site involving processing source data into pages
3. photo galleries
4. a static version of catza.net

Static site generators seem have made a comeback. Using a static site generator would close the circle for me since I used to use a custom static site generator written in Perl from 2004 to 2011.

to be continued