[This was originally published on the OSVDB blog.]
For years, we have used Typo3 for our blog, hosted on one of our servers. It isn’t bad software at all, I actually like it. That changes entirely when it sits behind Cloudflare. Despite our server being up and reachable, Cloudflare frequently reports the blog offline. When logged in as an administrator and posting a new blog or comment, Cloudflare challenges me by demanding a CAPTCHA, despite no similar suspicious activity. Having to struggle with a service designed to protect, that becomes a burden is bad. Add to that the administrative overhead of managing servers and blog software and it only takes away from time better spent maintaining the database.
With that, we have migrated over to the managed WordPress offering to free up time and reduce headache. The one downside to this is that Typo3 does not appear to have an export feature that WP recognizes. We have backfilled blogs back to early 2007 and will slowly get to the rest. The other downside is in migrating, comments left on previous blogs can’t be migrated in any semblance of their former self. Time permitting, we may cut/paste them over as a single new comment to preserve community feedback.
The upside, we’re much more likely to resume blogging, and with greater frequency. I currently have 17 drafts going, some dating back a year or more. Yes, the old blogging setup was that bad.