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by ThinkBeat 2361 days ago
I keep wanting to use Hugo, and I have made a few attempts. Moving away from Wordpress and its problems would be good.

I do think a few features are missing that I find valuable:

* Search (you can add it as an external service I haven't found one I trust and like yet. * Comments, there are several third-party comment providers that I can use, I tried out Disqus for a while but I didnt like nor trust them. I look at using forum software for the comments but then I have to run that and I might as well stay in WP

Then there are a few plug-ins I use and like.

The worst part of using WP is of course security. I have switched to fully managed WP hosting so I dont have to worry too much about that. I do still worry about plugins but my provider does not allow a lot of plug-ins due to issues and I can totally appreciate that.

4 comments

I'm running my blog (https://muffinman.io) on Jekyll and GitHub pages, and I've run into the same issues.

For search I generate a JSON array, with the name and the url to each post. Then I just client side javascript to search them. It adds a small traffic overhead, but users said they really like the search - it is instant and uses fuzzy matching algorithm.

Here is the code I use to generate the array: https://github.com/Stanko/Stanko.github.io/blob/master/_incl...

For comments I use staticman (https://staticman.net/), and it is brilliant. Instead of having a 3rd party comment system, it will issue a pull request to your repo. You can set it to automatically merge PRs or to merge them manually (and moderate them).

The only problem is that because of changes to the GitHub API quotas, their public instance gets overloaded. But you can easily setup your own instance. I use heroku, and their free tier is more than enough for my usecase (I get more than 100k users a year).

I even wrote a short post how to set it up on heroku: https://muffinman.io/running-staticman-on-heroku/

Hope that helps, happy hacking!

I use commento[1] on my site, running on my own server so no third party has access. I do not get many comments though so I don't know how it handles higher load.

[1] https://gitlab.com/commento/commento

Well, as long as Hugo remains a static site generator, it won't be able to support these features "out of the box". E.g. comments are simply not possible just with HTML + JS, so you'll either have to integrate a third-party service (Disqus, Staticman etc.), or move away from the "static site" concept.
Google custom search?