Ok, today let’s kill off a wordpress site before it gets hacked and leave up a static unhackable version of the site, note that using this method you can archive any publicly available site, be it wordpress, joomla, drupal, some proprietary CMS that you have grown to hate, whatever, whenever.

There are a few ways to do this, the simplest being wget -m, e.g. let’s ‘mirror’ example.com

 wget -m example.com

You now have a folder example.com with a static version of your site that is nigh invulnerable to hackers and you can leave up for years without worrying about updating or maintenance.

Templatize

Now that we have a static version how do we make changes without having to rewrite every page? We convert the static site into templates. If you’ll look at example.com/index.html you’ll notice we already have the base structure for our site.

So let’s fork this starter project:

http://smartergiving.org/free-nonprofit-starter-website/

go here to it’s github home page:

https://github.com/smartergiving/free-nonprofit-starter-website

click ‘fork’ in the upper right hand corner (you’ll need a free github account for this)

then you’ll notice this file:

https://github.com/smartergiving/free-nonprofit-starter-website/blob/master/_layouts/default.html

where you’ll see statements like this:

{% include head.html %}

which points to a file called head.html in the _includes directory here:

https://github.com/smartergiving/free-nonprofit-starter-website/tree/master/_includes

Alter that file to include the ‘head’ part of your theme (navbar and any other elements up top before the body)

Then do the same for the footer:

https://github.com/smartergiving/free-nonprofit-starter-website/blob/master/_includes/footer.html

And you are done with theming! It could not be simpler. YMMV, of course you might have issues getting all of your elements (CSS, images, galleries, etc), but removing the complexity of a wordpress theme is a smart idea. If only because a good portion of the wordpress attacks I’ve seen relied upon known vulnerabilities introduced by very popular themes.
Of all programmers, themers seem to be the least aware of security issues.

Migrate old content

It may be easier to just migrate your content with one of the many migration utilities here:

https://import.jekyllrb.com/docs/home/

You’ll notice on the right many links to “importers” including wordpress:

https://import.jekyllrb.com/docs/home/

As stated on that page: This importer only converts your posts and creates YAML front-matter. It does not import any layouts, styling, or external files (images, CSS, etc.).

So you’ll still need to import your theme as above

Why?

I’m going to go on record here and state, IF you are not a PHP programmer, and you are not a MySQL database admin, and you do not have the money to hire someone full-time to be those positions, then you have no business having a website made with PHP and MySQL. This includes wordpress, joomla, drupal, and just about any CMS you can think of. This stuff is not trivial, and security updates should be taken seriously. It is much to your advantage to eliminate your exposure to programming languages if you are not a progammer.

So do yourself a favor and hire someone to create a static site for you generated from templates (like Jekyll or Ghost), and you will not have to deal with hackers taking advantage of your site. You’ll not only spend less money and time initially, the savings over the long term will be substantial

Dynamic elements

Ok, what does a person need on their website that dynamic things like PHP and MySQL provide? And do we have some alternatives?

GUI editor? Check!

http://prose.io/

Also in the future we might see WYSIWYG support like:

http://substance.io/

see these posts:

https://github.com/prose/prose/issues/139 and https://github.com/prose/prose/issues/143

Commenting? Check!

discource (open source DIY solution):

http://www.discourse.org/

or disqus:

http://joshuacox.github.io/jekyll/2015/11/27/disqus-and-jekyll/

or facebook:

http://joshuacox.github.io/jekyll/2015/11/28/facebook-comments-and-jekyll/

Of the three I can recommend both discource and disqus, facebook I found to be problematic on nearly half the browsers I tested on, and since disqus will let you login with your facebook account and not vice versa disqus wins out in more people being able to comment on your content, while blocking spammer, hackers, etc, and they give you options for monetization, so I consider this one of the few proprietary services to be truly beneficial for the small time blogger.

Sharing with social media? Check!

http://joshuacox.github.io/jekyll/2015/12/01/Super-Simple-Sharing-Buttons/

Links, images, headings, etc? Check!

http://joshuacox.github.io/jekyll/2015/12/02/0-to-60-in-Markdown/

Notice any of this can be done on ANY static template generator site, this is not exclusive to jekyll. I just use it here as an example.

E-commerce? Check!

Jekyll-Store:

http://www.jekyll-store.com/

or with amazon:

http://joshuacox.github.io/amazon/

Forms? Check!

formkeep:

https://formkeep.com/guides/how-to-make-a-contact-form-in-jekyll?utm_source=github&utm_medium=jekyll-docs&utm_campaign=contact-form-jekyll

simpleform:

https://getsimpleform.com/

http://sebastien.saunier.me/blog/2014/04/15/you-do-not-need-a-database-for-your-contact-form.html

who recommends formspree:

https://formspree.io/

and wufoo:

http://www.wufoo.com/

stackoverflow question:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17983972/github-contact-form-with-jekyll

https://coderwall.com/p/8lq1ba/how-to-create-a-contact-form-for-a-github-pages-served-jekyll-website

Jekyll and the future

You may know that:

https://www.healthcare.gov/

was built using jekyll. But this is ancient history now, the leader of jekyll has left to do other things and why continue to use Jekyll? Because the principles are sound, you can build a site in Jekyll today and it can stay up for years without maintenance or updates.

So whereto next?

There are tons of great projects springing up based on these principles.

“But it’s static so that means it’s hard”, bullshit. It’s easier than dealing with a wordpress theme, and you can be up and rolling in three minutes if you follow this:

http://jekyllbootstrap.com/

and that guy went on to build ruhoh:

http://ruhoh.com/

which is very friendly and easy to use.

or you can use ghost:

https://ghost.org/

there are hundreds of new platforms out there now. And this does not mean you cannot have dynamic things in them, as I’ve already shown all the normal elements like commenting can be had easily.

If you need something custom, fire up a nodejs server, or sinatra, or ruby on rails, and you can do amazingly complex stuff like serve up a MMORPG through browser experience.

You can even fire up a drupal instance and use it as a database backend API for your static site.

https://groups.drupal.org/headless-drupal

which is how I envision some really cool stuff happening with D3 as a visualizer

https://d3js.org/

So the future is rich with options, get rid of wordpress now, stick to simple templates that generate static content and pull in the dynamic things you need using javascript and inhouse solutions or use many of the great truly free to use services like disqus and let them handle the hackers so you can get back to creating content.