It has happend: a new engine and a new look for Tobanet.de.

After more than 10 years with Dokuwiki, I thought it was high time to move forward and try something new.

A new concept

I used my Wiki to document on the go, write down snippets and some medium sized Howtos (or articles). But a large part of the contents is outdated now and I haven’t been happy with the template for quite some time. Furthermore, I was thinking more and more about this blogging thing.

The template question

Dokuwiki is a great peace of software – but there is one major problem that has been bothering me for a long time: there isn’t a single modern, responsive template I like. I used the Arctic Template from the beginning. It was a pretty cool template back then, with a modern look and all the functionality I needed.

But sadly, the template isn’t really responsive and mobile friendly. Furthermore it is stuck in some sort of “just keep it alive” maintenance mode. I hoped for better templates, but all what is available today can’t really compete with the alternatives. But it is what it is: a wiki. And for a wiki, the templates are pretty good.

Alternatives

When I looked for alternatives, I had some sort of blogging in mind. And when you look for blogging engines, there are the two major players:

• Jekyll
• WordPress
• … and Grav

Jekyll

Jekyll is great if your want to fiddle with ruby, gems, git, css, html, sass, bootstrap and you’re some sort of webdeveloper. Well, you should be, if you want to tune your theme the way you want. While looking into Jekyll and trying it out, I learned a lot and refreshed ancient knowledge about this stuff. But I am not a webdeveloper. I am a sysadmin. I want to publish stuff quick and easy. So I looked further.

Grav

Grav is quite new. It is very promising. And it is under heavy development. And that’s why I turned away. To use Grav and to tweak it the way you want, you have to dig deep and you should be some sort of php webdeveloper.

WordPress

Oh, WordPress. It has quite some reputation. I had to assist in cleaning up with some installations who were hacked on a daily basis. They were unmaintained for a long time, not updated and crammed with shady plugins. A nightmare.

But WordPress is the no 1 blogging engine. It can’t be that bad, right? And with the right theme it looks great and it has all the functionality you’ll ever need (if you install all the shady, unmaintained plugins out there).

So guess what, Tobanet.de is running WordPress now. Enjoy 😉

Dokuwiki

Yes, my Dokuwiki instance is still out there. There might even be new content. We will see how this blogging thing pans out.

Update 2020-12-18:

My Dokuwiki didn’t receive any significant content updates for years now. So I decided to shut it down and get rid of all the outdated and irrelevant stuff.