One year of using Docusaurus

One year ago, we switched from our homegrown Sliverstripe blog solution to Docusaurus. Time to look back and see if the move was worth it.

At first, the migration looked like a simple task, I've covered the steps we took to migrate the blog content in another blog post already. However, this is only one part of the story. Converting the content to Markdown was easy, but cleaning up some articles took a bit more time than I expected. Since this is our 4th blogging platform so far, we had to deal with some "legacy" HTML gathered in some blog posts.

Additionally, getting Google to understand the new link structure and making sure that the pages get properly indexed again was a lot more of an effort than I expected. I can't really say how much time went into cleaning things up. Especially the nginx configuration needed a lot of tweaks to "translate" old urls to the new format and "deprecating" urls that no longer existed. There's still some work left to do, but we are on a good track, I would say.

In general, I would say, moving to Docusaurus was worth it. It is a lot easier to add content and properly format it, compared to our old, legacy blogging platform.

However, moving to Docusaurus introduced a few "challenges" that we haven't yet found a solution for, namely:

1. Obviously, you need to have the frontend stack running on your computer to see the preview of the blog. For non-frontend developers, this might be a bit challenging. Sure, you can commit the markdown files and check on our staging environment how things look, but that might not be the best workflow.

2. There's no good way to schedule and automatically posts. I have covered our current publishing workflow in this blog post.

In general, it's easy to work with Docusaurus, especially if you want to add custom functionality. We'll for sure keep Docusaurus as blogging platform around, so watch this space for more tech content :)