Hello Gridsome!

Fun fact: while my professional web-developer career always based on Drupal I used WordPress for my blog since I published the very first post in 2005 (in Hungarian)! The reason is simple: I met with WordPress earlier than I met with Drupal.

Times are changing however. And I found myself writing my posts (and other documents) using markdown for a while. I've also started to be interested in Vue.js, I was curious about the Jamstack and I became a fan of Gridsome.

Based on these things it was clear that migrating to Gridsome is the logical step ahead. But I always had some good excuses why not to do it yet: "I have no time!", "I can't decide what kind of headless CMS solution should I use!", "How will I move my content?", "What design will I use?", "How will I keep it bi-lingual (English, Hungarian)?" and so on.

Maybe nothing has changed for a long time if I not made myself remember to one of the developer rules: KISS – Keep It Simple Stupid!

Design? Find something what I like and customize it! Bi-lingual? Language management is nice but not essential for my blog (and can be implemented later) – I started to write in Hungarian back in the days, but the wast majority of my post is written in English nowadays. Do I write markdown by default? Than I should keep this habit and I should not look for any CMS solution for my blog! OK. But how will I migrate my existing content from WordPress to markdown? Let's look for a solution!

It wasn't hard at all: I quickly found the WP Gatsby Markdown Exporter created by the developers of TinaCMS (what is an exciting project too but it is for Gatsby only for the time being).

So I had my content in markdown. Then I looked for a Gridsome markdown starter. I was thinking just using the official blog starter because I like it but finally I decided to go with the Gridsome Portfolio Starter because it looked pleasant to me and because it uses Tailwind CSS what I wanted to try too for a while.

The rest was not complicated. I updated the metadata of my exported posts (the latest ones for now) and customized the starter: making it even more simple and more clean than it was before.

The hosting became simpler too: I use GitLab and Netlify. It was really easy to set up the publishing/deployment workflow and configure some redirects I needed.

So my blog now being a modern Jamstack static site packed with cool features thanks to Gridsome, hosted on a cloud platform has great performance and nice metrics in tools like Lighthouse.

Thanks to all who made this possible!