Posted on October 6, 2012 by rodney
Tags: meta, git, dev

I have converted our blog to the ikiwiki system. For readers, this won’t much, but for me ikiwiki is much better than Wordpress.

For a start, you can’t properly edit Wordpress offline then post your changes when connected. Secondly Wordpress is a PHP app with a continuous stream of security vulnerabilities found. You have to constantly upgrade it, like feeding a virtual pet. Thirdly, it’s a clumsy process to make web pages with javascript and maps and stuff in Wordpress. Lastly, the built in photo upload function in Wordpress is kind of annoying and has never been good. I think I will find a better gallery solution with ikiwiki.

Ikiwiki uses git or subversion to store changes, so you have built in versioning and distributed lock-free editing. If I were setting up a new wiki for work or something, I would choose ikiwiki without hesitation. If I had known about ikiwiki before bike touring I would never have used wordpress. The offline editing and photo uploading would have been very very convenient.

To convert the wordpress pages, I piped the Wordpress XML dump into a script someone wrote. It was mostly painless, until I found had to modify it to support transfer and conversion of images from wordpress. But it’s done now.