[HN Gopher] Show HN: I made a service to convert WordPress blogs...
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       Show HN: I made a service to convert WordPress blogs to Hugo
        
       Hi Hacker News!  I made this project to read a WordPress export and
       create the markdown files for Hugo. It'll speed up the process of
       moving your blog over to Hugo and let you avoid a bunch of manual
       work.  It came about when I was talking to somebody who was trying
       to move their site over and didn't want to manually copy and
       reformat all their posts. They had trouble finding a tool to do it,
       so I wrote one.  I want to make sure it's useful to people before
       charging them, so it'll give you a download with 3 pages and 5 blog
       posts converted for free and without asking for any information. If
       you like what you see, there is a one-time charge through Stripe to
       convert everything.  I hope you find it useful, and I welcome any
       and all feedback on it!  Thanks for reading!
        
       Author : symkat
       Score  : 23 points
       Date   : 2025-01-22 17:28 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (wp2hugo.blogdb.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (wp2hugo.blogdb.org)
        
       | alok-g wrote:
       | Does it handle themes, plugins, etc., as well? Thx.
        
         | symkat wrote:
         | It does not, it converts just the blog posts and pages to help
         | you get started on a conversion. It gives you the smol theme by
         | default and the page that gives you access to the downloads
         | gives additional information for finding themes at
         | https://themes.gohugo.io/
        
       | JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B wrote:
       | Good. But I do wonder why we're flooded with "services" like that
       | when a simple open-source Python script could do this. $150 FFS.
       | I hope you have clients but the open-source dev inside me is
       | dying a bit.
       | 
       | Edit: 413 Request Entity Too Large.
        
         | toomuchtodo wrote:
         | People pay to have their problems solved, not code (although
         | code _is_ one of the ways to solve some problems!). If you made
         | such a service for free, that 's great! It's helpful, it
         | scratches an itch to build you have, it is a net positive to
         | put it into the world. Importantly, non technical people want
         | their hand held and usually, are willing to pay for it.
         | Something to consider. There is room for both solutions and
         | code, based on bucketing of use cases and personas.
        
           | JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B wrote:
           | > non technical people want their hand held
           | 
           | I know but I'm still not happy about it. Also Hugo is not
           | what I would call a WYSIWYG application like Wordpress, so...
        
         | BryantD wrote:
         | https://github.com/ashishb/wp2hugo is pretty good. That said I
         | think there's probably room for a good solution that doesn't
         | require command line proficiency.
        
         | symkat wrote:
         | In my case, at least a big part of it is I'm looking for a job
         | again and doing something like this to get myself out there, I
         | already had one person who was interested in this specific type
         | of conversion so maybe there are others.
         | 
         | Thanks for the 413 note! I've just upped the
         | client_max_body_size if you want to give it a try again.
        
       | GlacierFox wrote:
       | $150 haha. Wtf.
        
         | toomuchtodo wrote:
         | This is ~1 hour of software engineer, ~2 hours of technology
         | generalist time. Time is non renewable, and humans have a cost.
         | If you're an agency, business, whatever, and have the need to
         | make something WP static via Hugo, this is a reasonable cost to
         | solve the problem quick.
        
           | GlacierFox wrote:
           | Makes sense, you're right. I'm glad this single-use static
           | file converter is $150. Thank you.
        
             | toomuchtodo wrote:
             | Pricing and product market fit discovery is a process.
             | Solve the problem, make it maintainable, make it perform.
             | You are on a VC startup accelerator funded forum where a
             | component is encouraging makers and builders to solve
             | problems (sometimes, for money), after all. Encouragement
             | and constructive feedback is both cheap and kind.
        
       | jayemar wrote:
       | I may be wrong here, but I understood Hugo sites to be static
       | sites, therefore not supporting comments, for example. How does
       | your tool handle migrating a WordPress side with comments to a
       | Hugo site?
        
         | symkat wrote:
         | You're right, Hugo is for static sites! Hugo does support
         | comments through things like Disqus (https://gohugo.io/content-
         | management/comments/).
         | 
         | My service only converts the blog posts and pages themself and
         | helps you get started on a conversion.
        
         | stanski wrote:
         | The vast majority of WordPress sites are static sites with no
         | use for comments.
        
           | ipaddr wrote:
           | The vast majority use plugins not available outside of
           | wordpress.
        
       | markx2 wrote:
       | And how do I upload an image of my cat to my all new Hugo site?
       | 
       | WP lets me drag/drop or upload media very very easily. Has done
       | for years.
       | 
       | Hugo? or indeed most SSG's?
        
       | revicon wrote:
       | Thanks for sharing @symkat, love seeing developer side projects.
       | 
       | Was curious why you picked Hugo over something like Astro. I'm
       | migrating a site off of Jekyll and have found Astro has a lot of
       | interesting features if I want to use them but is at its heart a
       | static site generator and seems to be a pretty easy lift to
       | migrate to. Haven't done much evaluation of Hugo yet.
        
         | symkat wrote:
         | Thank you for commenting!
         | 
         | Really the reason I picked Hugo is because that's what the
         | person I was talking to wanted. He'd only found contractors who
         | would charge more than he wanted to pay to do a manual
         | conversion, and said even something that just got his pages and
         | posts over would be worthwhile to him.
         | 
         | I have more experience with Jekyll. In fact, I had tried to
         | start a hosted platform with a CMS for it that I opened sourced
         | a while back (https://github.com/symkat/MyJekyllBlog) but it
         | never really got traction.
         | 
         | At this point I'm actively looking for a new job and figured
         | getting this on Hacker News might be helpful for that.
         | 
         | I hadn't heard of Astro before, it looks neat!
        
           | revicon wrote:
           | I was all about Jekyll 4 or 5 years ago and wouldn't have
           | considered spending time switching but now on modern hardware
           | it is ridiculously difficult to get the jekyll runtime to
           | install and run properly, we've had multiple team members
           | myself included spend hours dealing with hunting down random
           | forum posts or github pull requests outlining the need to
           | downgrade ruby in one way or another to support apple silicon
           | or some other such thing that hasn't been patched in more
           | recent versions. And the Jekyll docker images have been
           | abandoned for a few years and no longer work on arm
           | architectures.
           | 
           | Hopefully moving to a more actively supported static site
           | generator will benefit us but its also a lesson to us that we
           | need to keep track of continued support of apps we rely on.
           | It's easy to just build and forget something and then there's
           | a fire drill when you have to go back and change something
           | that hasn't been re-deployed in a while.
        
       | binary_slinger wrote:
       | The real money is in converting sites with plugins and retaining
       | the functionality which in many cases isn't static. The copying
       | of data to another tool is the easy part.
        
         | symkat wrote:
         | I totally agree. This came about because of a pretty expensive
         | quote the person I was talking to got.
        
       | nikolay wrote:
       | WordPress is not just content - it's plugins such as WooCommerce,
       | GiveWP, email marketing, BuddyPress, membership plugins, etc.
        
         | wlesieutre wrote:
         | They did specify "WordPress blogs" in the title. Not all
         | WordPress powered sites are blogs.
        
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       (page generated 2025-01-22 23:01 UTC)