Tale of two CMS’s

First HyperTemplate, which appealed with its modern simple indie offering, and secondly EmDash a more modern database based approach. For a single user site it actually does not offer many advantages, but with the site being still rather small this was the only opportunity to still do it.

Main differences

Being familiar with Astro and WordPress through school I knew EmDash is a whole another level of complexity over HyperTemplate. They both do offer cli through emdash and hyperctl. But EmDash had substantial amount of skills and better documentation. I’m guessing mostly due to it being Cloudflare vs some small company, there is a substantive difference in scale and available resources.

Technical difference

The other is statically generated bundle site and other is more database centered. Both can easily be deployed to Cloudflare. And even though I don’t generally appreciate the tooling around npm based projects I have to admit that a lot of work has gone into getting it to this state. Usually the project with more vibrant community around it wins and this likely is going to be one that lasts.

The actual transition

I knew it wouldn’t be too difficult. So first I installed the tools & skills required and then pretended to ask an agent how hard the task would be. Then asked to write down detailed phased plan markdown files. And started a new agent with one phase as only input sequentially. Today they are so heavily post-trained for this kind of thing that it is best to just hands-off supervise the process.

The only snafu

I have two languages in the site: en & fi and EmDash has an i18n system. In earlier version I’d rolled my own system. To me it would not have really made sense to attempt doing everything correctly first time. So I was happy to migrate it without touching the languages or as is. So after that there was a second phased plan to migrate the data at this stage already in databases to have language information associated with it

One last thing
This is where I encountered the only problem. As it was already deployed to Cloudflare it was caught in staging and was never deployed any further. The toggle between languages had stopped working. Trust but verify your LLM’s output. Always.