Switching from Hugo to Dokuwiki

When I first started to make a little website for myself as a hobby, I made it in Hugo, using the Cupper theme. But I've switched to Dokwiki now, and I feel much more at home.

When I first decided to make a little website for myself, I found a blog that described setting it up on a Digital Ocean App, with which you can host a website for free. After some online searching, I found that setting the website up using Hugo was probably my best bet. Hugo is a “framework for building websites”: you write the content in simple Markdown, and Hugo turns it into a website for you. Using templates, you can change the way your website looks, and how it works. I chose the Cupper theme because it looked simple, and not too standard.

The old Hugo with Cupper website

Setting it up turned out to be a bit more complicated than I thought - writing text was easy¹⁾, but everything else felt too complicated for a simple personal website. I spent too much time poking at weird CSS files ²⁾, i18n³⁾, and git submodules⁴⁾. And that is okay, if I need to do it occasionally have to do it, but I felt like I had to relearn it every 6 months when I wanted to change something. But I also did not want to change something that was working okay, so I left it as it is.

But, unfortunately, since the beginning of 2023, the Cupper theme is no longer maintained, meaning that if there are bugs ore problems, I will need to fix them myself. And since then, I have been looking for a replacement. And since I love Dokuwiki, I wondered whether I could not make it in Dokuwiki somehow. And lo and behold, I found Mikio, which basically just makes Dokuwiki look less… Dokuwiki.

The rest is actually surprisingly easy. Just install a bunch of extensions to make it behave more like a blog or personal website , and things just work™. The most important ones are:

• The Mikio template, and its sister Mikioplugin
• The Blog, Tag, Semantic, Fontface, and Discussion plugin to make it behave Dokuwiki more like a “normal” website.
• The Translation plugin for translations
• The MathJax and doi plugins, because this is useful for sciency pages
• The smtp plugin for notifications of the website to myself, and the bureaucracy plugin for the contact form.

And of we go! Now, to fill the website with content, I just convert the content of the old website (written in Markdown) into the Dokuwiki language - easy using pandoc. Some things need some manual intervention (references mostly), but it really is minimal. Finally, I added some stylish new elements, and we end up with the new website!

The new Dokuwiki website

Hopefully, it is a bit more permanent this time!