Ask HN: What self-hosted CMS can import from WordPress? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What self-hosted CMS can import from WordPress?

17 pointslkrubner13 comments

Since 2010 I've been self-hosting my WordPress blog:

http://www.smashcompany.com/

But I want to move to a new CMS. The most polite thing I can say about WordPress is that it's moved in a direction away from what I need. The new(ish) WYSIWYG editor, with the blocks, is very far from what I need or want.

What I want is WordPress, circa 2010, but without security flaws.

Right now, the biggest problem I face is the security flaws. The last time I upgraded I was immediately hacked, and after many attempts to get WordPress setup correctly, I found I could not avoid being hacked unless I chmod everything 0444, which means I cannot currently upload images, which I find frustrating.

So what is another CMS I can use? Preferably one that has great import of old WordPress instances? A static site generator would be fine with me.

View on HN

> But I want to move to a new CMS. The most polite thing I can say about WordPress is that it's moved in a direction away from what I need. The new(ish) WYSIWYG editor, with the blocks, is very far from what I need or want.

Why don't you just turn off the block editor? https://wordpress.org/plugins/disable-gutenberg/ or similar.

> Right now, the biggest problem I face is the security flaws. The last time I upgraded I was immediately hacked, and after many attempts to get WordPress setup correctly, I found I could not avoid being hacked unless I chmod everything 0444, which means I cannot currently upload images, which I find frustrating.

Switching to another CMS is likely not going to change the possibility of getting hacked. There are plenty of Wordpress sites out there that don't get hacked. I would politely suggest that you may be doing something wrong and that there might be something less invasive that you can do than migrating to a different CMS.

> A static site generator would be fine with me.

I highly recommend Hugo if you're going to switch to a static site generator. Lots of Wordpress importers available, some of which you can find here: https://gohugo.io/tools/migrations/#wordpress

It shouldn't be impossible to secure wp as-is, happy to help if need be. Reduce excess plugins, enable automatic updates, avoid plugins that can't be updated via wp.org repo., reset wp salts. You'd likely find it's very reasonable afterwards.

For the editor: Install this, it's supported through 2024 (at least) and will revert the editor to the old version:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/classic-editor/

I think for most personal/homelab users the issue is more how much attention running WP causes. You see the scans, once they know it is WP it escalates. Very targeted.

I completely agree you can reduce the risk in WP to an acceptable level. It has just become more work than most of us want for hobby projects if you want to do anything more than lock down basic.

Publii. It has a WP Importer tool. Your site layout looks similar to some of the free themes. The "old school" simplicity of using a desktop CMS is great in my opinion.

You could try Hugo.

Below I share an official Hugo link that explains how to accomplish what you are after.

https://gohugo.io/tools/migrations/#wordpress

Good luck!

P.S.: Keep an eye on https://www.classicpress.net/ , maybe it's also a good alternative? Give it a try.

Ghost is one option. It’s modern and clean and can import content from WordPress: https://ghost.org/docs/migration/wordpress/

It was impossible to import a larger wp site to ghost for me when I tried. Publii could do it.

Wagtail is one option: https://wagtail.org/blog/wordpress-to-wagtail-migration-kit/

I moved my personal blog to Grav a couple of years ago:

https://pathar.tl/

https://getgrav.org/

There are plugins for WordPress to generate markdown files from your posts and then you can import that into Grav. I self-host this in Docker and find it much more pleasing to actually write things. Statamic is another similar markdown-based CMS that I've been eyeballing.

Like you I also dislike the Blocks editor, however the fix is easy. You can install the Classic Editor (https://wordpress.org/plugins/classic-editor/) plugin and get the old interface back.

You can switch between the two if you want, and can configure it to be the default.

I used wordpress from ~2010, on 2022 still had it with 15k articles :) totally unmanageable, I switch to Xenforo PHP forum (self hosted), I wrote an appication doing the migration for the articles, operation done! https://bit.ly/3WFzhJD

You can export a database inside the WordPress admin and convert to Jekyll.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/jekyll-exporter/

I believe craftcms does have a Wordpress importer. I’ve used craft for years and recommend it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com