Short story

There is nothing more to say: WordPress is gone, Pelican is in.

Long story

Last year this wiki was running a self-hosted WordPress solution. But it got hacked.

I never got the time to investigate how it happened (even though I had the auto-update feature enabled) but it happend. I guess some malicious files were uploaded and used to execute code (php) on the box:

• it messed up the front-end pages
• it started sending spam in the background
• lots of spam
• I didn't have any backup of the template files, only the data (content) was safe
• I was using a custom theme which was pretty difficult to reconfigure

So I decided to move everything to a new solution, free, and drop WordPress (which is a mess in terms of security).

I was waiting for more than 1 year for Octopress 3.0 to be released because I liked their theme and layout.

But in the meantime I've discovered even a better product: Pelican. Pelican is a static site generator, written in Python, that requires no database or server-side logic. And it has an Octopress theme. The site generated by Pelican can be server by Github using Github Pages. You can find good references online about this implementation.

Here is what my install looked like on a debian box:

apt-get install python-pip
pip install virtualenv
virtualenv ve-pelican
cd ve-pelican/
source bin/activate
pip install pelican
pip install Markdown
pelican-quickstart
git clone https://github.com/duilio/pelican-octopress-theme octopress
pelican-themes -i octopress/ && rm -r octopress/
deactivate

Now you just need to add your content and play a little with the config files.

The king is dead, long live the king !