Migration from Ghost CMS to Kirby CMS

For many years I run this website with the help of Ghost CMS, which I liked very much for a long time, because of its speed, the reduced panel for administration and the very good editor, for writing articles. This I have also already mentioned in some posts.

In recent months, however, I was bothered by the focus of the development team on professional content writers, as it felt only features like members, subscription and newsletter were developed. I also always missed a certain flexibility in many things and the possibility to offer contributions also in multiple languages.

After some research and testing of alternatives I ended up with Kirby CMS, which scared me a bit at the beginning, because it's not that beginner-friendly (I'm neither a developer nor a designer) and there's no easy way to migrate. But Kirby offers all the advantages that I can think of as disadvantages with Ghost, such as

• Multilingualism
• Native search
• Easy to change structure and design of individual pages
• Plugins
• Social networks and comments can be integrated locally, completely without tracking

The biggest hurdle for me in the beginning was the design of the new website. I couldn't adopt Ghost's theme and I couldn't find one for Kirby that I liked. I didn't want to commission anything because I don't make any money with my site. It wasn't until I learned about Tailwind CSS and tried it out in Kirby that I realized that by copying a few examples, I could get a result I liked (although it still had a lot of room for improvement) even without much design or programming knowledge. Additionally, the community of Kirby helped me extremely, many thanks for that (especially Ahmet, Bastian and Sonja ❤️)!

Unfortunately, I couldn't transfer the data in one go either, but I was able to "recreate" all existing posts pretty quickly thanks to the great, just released, copy & paste feature of Kirby 3.6.

With this post and the conversion, I've now accomplished all the steps to hopefully be happy with Kirby as the CMS for my website for a long time to come.

I'm happy about comments about it (gladly also about errors), also to try out the new comment system 😉