Goodbye WordPress, hello Pure Blog!

27 July 2026

Back in February, I discovered Pure Blog, and it has stayed in a corner of my head since then. A few days ago, I installed it locally and gave it a try.

Long story short: I spent most of my free time during the last ten days or so migrating my content, porting my custom WordPress plugins and tweaking my Pure Blog setup.

This morning, I finally pulled the trigger, five months after that idea crossed my mind and a seed was planted. Cafélog is now powered by Pure Blog.

Why Pure Blog?

Well, in the past I already tried to move away from WordPress to a homemade static website, which turned out to be a nightmare to use. So I went back to WordPress a few months later.

I wrote about that, in French though, in these two articles:

À la recherche du web perdu (March 2025)
De retour sur WordPress (July 2025)

In short:

In March 2025, I left WordPress for a homemade static site, drawn by the idea of simplicity, control, and reconnecting with the raw, hands-on web I grew up with. Building it was genuinely enjoyable: I picked up HTML/CSS, PHP, JS, Git and shell scripting along the way (with some AI assistance).
But: publishing became a five-step ordeal (local PHP server, manual HTML templating, manual homepage updates, GitHub sync, custom FTP deploy script). So cumbersome I had written myself a README just to remember the steps.
The mastery was real, but it came at the cost of friction every time I wanted to publish, which defeated the point.
In July 2025, I gave up the purist approach and reinstalled WordPress, trading full control for a workflow with less friction.

Then, in February 2026, I discovered Pure Blog, and as I wrote above, it has since stayed in a corner of my head until I downloaded it and explored it locally. The more I discovered and used it, the more I was charmed and pumped.

Pure Blog ticks all the boxes of what I was looking for in a blog platform. In a few words: simplicity, lightness, flexibility (easy customisation, but also more complex if wished), flat files and Markdown based (no database involved), built in good old PHP, the perfect language if I’m feeling inspired to tinker a bit. Bonus: it’s an open-source project built by an enthusiastic fellow blogger.

Therefore, I finally decided to move out again from WordPress.

The migration

It was fun and challenging: I decided to migrate all my content by hand, instead of using the WordPress importer. It allowed me to check and adjust the different pieces of content I’m used to embedding in my posts: images, YouTube embedded videos, local videos, audio files… and to adjust the CSS along the way.

I also had to find a way to port two custom WordPress plugins:

Microblog: I use Pure Blog’s Notes, which is very suitable for that particular need. I also imported all my notes by hand, to check if everything was ok and adjust the slugs, some links and embedded content.
Moments: My own little Instagram, which works with Flickr. In short, I rebuilt it using Pure Blog's custom routes and a hook to handle a custom shortcode.

The Pure Blog Docs are very well written and useful. I couldn't have done all this migration work without them.

I also had to:

Adjust the .htaccess file (for example to add redirections).
Tweak the CSS a bit to make Cafélog look like my own website rather than the out-of-the-box Pure Blog theme.
Review the taxonomy. The use I had of categories and tags in WordPress was different than it is now.
Implement custom shortcodes for series like “Framing Japan” and “Night City Wanderer”.
Create a new fr layout for a few articles that I write in French. I made a special hook just to fit specific French typographic rules such as non-breaking spaces for some characters.
And probably other things I forgot.

All in all, it was fun, interesting, smooth and I had a blast doing that migration work!

About cover images

During the migration, I was still thinking about my last two articles about the AI-generated images and how I was using them as my cover images on almost all my articles.

I finally decided to remove the cover images from almost all my articles, except for a few, the two above included.

I kept the cover images of all my previous posts as the featured images, though, to generate the Open Graph images. But in the future, and as I wrote in the second article linked above, I will try to create my own cover/featured images most of the time. That being said, I still think it’s fun and creative to generate images with AI, so I certainly won’t forbid myself to do it again, from time to time.

In conclusion

I’m glad to be using Pure Blog. It’s a great, flexible and light CMS. It really fits my needs and I kinda find joy in using it. I shouldn't say that I won't change again in the future (I know myself well enough), but I really think I found the CMS I was looking for.

Thank you Kev for building Pure Blog!