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 using Perl programming language about 12 years ago.

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 or CMS available. But it is battle tested and very reliable. The feature set seems to be comprehensive as most of the features I need are available as plug-ins.

Although I not a great fan of PHP programming language I find that PHP code is very easy to understand and quick to write.

The flat file based storage system of DokuWiki makes it very simple to manage the content. Backing up is straightforward and 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 to a DokuWiki-based site and all that they have to do is to write their output to text files using the DokuWiki syntax.

Since 2019 I've been building a backend system that generates pages programmatically for DokuWiki to serve. The sections of this site that use this technology are Photos, Music collection and (in Finnish) Ilveslinnan vieraskirja.

Photo galleries used to use a commercial but rather inexpensive jAlbum software. I decided to migrate the photo galleries to my DokuWiki site.

TO BE CONTINUED