Migrating niche CMSes is a nightmare

I recently had some issues with Nerfed Gamer's CMS; An update failed, borking the entire site until I did a partial backup restore.. Which also ended up duplicating a bunch of my posts (but not all) for some fucking reason.

On top of that, the developers decided to go fucking hard on AI, even rebuilding the entire core site with AI in a very obvious fashion (AI slop front-ends tend to be very easy to recognize given they tend to have generic muzak design language).

So, fuck that shit, as they say.

I liked Grav CMS for the most part; it was fast, and I am comfortable writing in Markdown.. but diving head-first into the AI bubble on top of an absolutely basic update failing are massive red flags to choke down, so I decided to move on.

I wanted to find something low-maintenance, even considering a managed platform like Medium or Substack (except, you know, NOT Substack.. Because Nazis). I asked around, and another person on a forum I frequent said they were looking at Publii.

I looked into it, and it seemed interesting; Self-hosted with a local static build process (like this site here), but with a CMS app for management (unlike this site). Supposedly you could even store it's files in a Dropbox folder and work on it from multiple machines, which would've been perfect.

Oh, if that were only true.

After spending around 6 hours doing massaging for the markdown files from Grav CMS (because Publii can only supposedly import WordPress, but I'm sus on that - you'll see why below) and copy/pasting them into Publii, I started fucking with the theming.

There was a theme that was really similar to a design language and UI I was going to pursue - called Mono - so I figured I'd just pop it on short-term while I build my own theme.

That's when the trouble really started.

Of course, I say "really" because I had one weird quirk: Sometimes featured images wouldn't import. As it turns out, Publii was choking on any images larger than 1920 pixels wide or have.. something.. going on with them. For images below 1920px wide all I had to do was drag-and-drop again, and again, and again until it finally ingested it.

When I switched to the Mono theme, I got asked to rebuild my responsive image library. Sure, sounds good.. And it froze on it.

After trying again, and again, and again, it would only rebuild 1 set or 3 and then completely freeze, never completing the rebuild.

This is why the featured image upload was choking: Publii was unable to actually process the images reliably.

I temporarily disabled response images and had zero issues; Not ideal, but good enough for now. I figured I'd try doing the rebuild on Windows; maybe the Linux AppImage was struggling for whatever reason.

Fucking incepting some foreshadowing here, folks.

Anyway, I went to set up the icon nav in the theme using the recommended plugin, and it fucking renders malformed HTML.

Jesus fuck, c'mon.. So I just use plain text nav entries for now. It's fine, this theme is temporary, I don't give a fuck that hard to want an icon nav on a temp theme.

Moving on: It was time to move my CMS files to Dropbox and try that out. I thought I was being smart, too; I copied the entire folder so I could restore it if something happened.

Well, something happened.

Publii couldn't see jack shit on my Windows machine after moving the site files..

.. And nor could Linux.

I reset the file location, and it STILL CAN'T FUCKING SEE THE SITE FILES.

I try something: Creating the "site" again and copying the file backups back in afterwards, and that seemed to work.. But it's a big fucking clue: I can't rely on this shit to work between machines if it's struggling this hard.

I try doing a backup before I go fucking with it further: Backup spits out fine, so I decide to try importing that on Windows.. And it doesn't fucking import anything.

I try importing it on Linux, and again, it doesn't import fucking anything.

This. Is. Fucking. Absurd.

It's at this point that I say "fuck it."

I thought about it for a while, and decided to do something different, yet not:

I'm going to use WordPress again, but.. I'm not.

Let me explain:

I'm going to run WordPress on a private dev URL (with auth) and do a static build and deploy to the actual Nerfed Gamer domain.

Of course, that's not without it's headaches; I had thought I could just run an RSS import, but no.. WP's RSS importer fucking sucks and couldn't import images at all, instead placholdering CDATA in there instead of the actual images.

So instead I'm going to try a (premium) Markdown importer using the data I already massaged for my migration to Publii; I checked with the developer to confirm it'd do what I needed at the minimum, and he affirmed it should work (on a Sunday morning no less, so kudos to the developer).

I'm going to avoid linking to them - for now - until I confirm it fucking works, because I don't want to promote something that doesn't.

I clearly have had a lot of issues with other developers lately.

A lot of other developers just seem to have issues in fucking parasite-shitting, rotten Cheetoh-finger-sucking general.