Updating sites

Easy updates are vital.

Just adding a post or a page usually means adding the correct file in the correct place and running one command. New themes will make things a little more complex. You will have to check that it works; some themes will need other values filled in to create list pages and the main page.

When you are blogging, Hugo updates according to added files in the correct directory. You actually have the option of adding files or using the add command to add a new post. Except for being simple to do, when your site becomes big, you only want to update new content. In the case of Hugo and Jekyll, the default is to cache the content and do version updates.

Adding content from your old WordPress blog is also an issue that you may have considered. Hugo, Jekyll and Pelican have importers that can take your old content directly from a site or a backup. In all cases, there are slight differences between the systems that you may have to handle manually. One example is that each post can only have one category in Pelican, unless you use a plug-in.

If you want to switch your theme, in theory you add all the theme files and change a setting in your configuration file. In reality, you must read through the theme documentation to make sure all the files are included. Links on the main page have to be set by the theme; this is usually the default, but not always.

Uploading depends on the platform, as we said earlier. They all have scripts available to update most platforms. You have several options, including command-line tools from each platform and volunteer scripts available on their respective home pages.

Jekyll has an automated script using the continuous integration (CI) of platforms like GitHub, Travis and Buddy. Using this service, you can just git push your directories and let the Jekyll magic happen on the service. As we saw earlier, Hugo has a straightforward approach to use the command line from the services.

Finally, upgrading the software is a simple case of using the package manager of choice.

The resulting files you can easily control with git when you create or change a Jekyll site. Even though you have this option for all, there are other options available for you.