The new blog with TYPO3

My blog was the central component of my website for a long time. When I started it in 2008, TYPO3 was not yet as present in my work as it is today. As WordPress was a popular blog system at the time, I decided to go for it.

Even when I later focused exclusively on TYPO3, I hesitated to switch blogs.

I would have liked to migrate my articles and comments to TYPO3, but it didn't seem that easy. Over the years, I kept reading that others were planning similar moves. After the announcement, however, I usually heard nothing more about it. I even tried a commercial provider for such migrations. The result was disappointing.

So my blog continued to run on WordPress, even when I decided to migrate my main website to TYPO3 as part of a rebranding in 2022. The blog ran in parallel on a subdomain.

I was never completely satisfied with this solution.

Many of the typical blog functions were no longer necessary:

• Comments: Used to be frequently used, but that has greatly diminished. That's why I no longer use them.
• Categories and tags: No longer so relevant for me.
• RSS feed: This is also no problem with TYPO3.
• SEO and performance: Both can be better controlled with TYPO3.

Another advantage of TYPO3 over WordPress is the implementation of multilingualism. I can easily offer my website and blog in different languages. In future, I will therefore also provide most blog articles in English.

What is my current solution?

Although there are various blog extensions for TYPO3, I see one disadvantage with all of them: blog articles are created as pages, which could make the page tree confusing if you blog frequently.

That's why I chose Georg Ringer's news extension. It offers everything I need.

Is the migration complete?

Not quite yet. There are still a few things missing, such as a search function, which will be added in the next few days or weeks.

But apart from that, everything is working smoothly. New blog articles will only appear here, and there is of course a feed for RSS users.

What will happen to the old blog?

It will remain online, because with almost 500 articles and thousands of comments it still offers a lot of content. I have deactivated the comment function. I might turn the old blog into a static website at some point to avoid having to work with WordPress updates.