The new blog with TYPO3

My blog was the centerpiece of my website for a long time. When I launched it in 2008, TYPO3 was not yet as central to my work as it is today. As WordPress was a popular blog system at the time (and still is now), I decided to use it to create my blog.

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 so easy. Over the years, I kept reading that others were planning similar projects, but after the announcement, you usually didn't hear anything more about it. I even tried a commercial provider for such migrations - but the result was disappointing.

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

However, I was never completely satisfied with this solution.

Many of the typical blog functions were no longer necessary. For example, comments. They used to be used a lot, but that has greatly diminished. That's why I no longer use the comment function.

I also no longer considered the importance of categories and tags to be so important.

RSS feed? That's no problem with TYPO3 either.

SEO and performance? This can definitely be better controlled and optimized with TYPO3.

Another advantage of TYPO3 compared to WordPress is the easy implementation of multilingualism. With TYPO3, I can easily offer my website and blog in different languages, which is an important factor for me. In the future, I will therefore also make most of my blog articles available in English in order to reach a larger target group. Thanks to TYPO3, translating and managing the content will be simple and straightforward.

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. Future blog articles will only appear here, and for RSS users there is of course a feed.

What will happen to the old blog?

I'm keeping it online, because with almost 500 articles and thousands of comments, it still offers a lot of content. However, 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.