OK so, I lost this website a few years ago to a Joomla update that went completely off the rails and trashed my shit. It was, quite frankly, so frustrating I decided I did not have the energy to fix it, so I just wiped everything and put up a placeholder page. Joomla, in the time since, has upgraded to a new major version. Joomla's ecosystem is built mostly around paid plugins, which mostly did not seem to work with the new version! Uh oh, you've broken the trust AND the entire plugin ecosystem! Time to find something new. I am not a web developer, I'm a database and ETL developer that knows bash and python. Building a website from scratch was pretty much out of the question, so I had to go hunt around for a CMS that would work for me.

First, I tried OctoberCMS on my test subdomain and could not get it to install. I have no idea why.

Then, I tried WinterCMS, which is a fork of OctoberCMS that had alot of the same features, but the plugin ecosystem is not 1:1, and the blog plugin couldn't embed youtube videos, which for me is a dealbreaker. Sorry to say I had to abandon it.

Before looking into other options I attempted to install OctoberCMS again, and it worked. Weird! No idea what's different, but okay. I began getting to work on learning how to interact with this thing. Lots of Django-type {{ variable }} implementation so making the adjustment wasn't too bad, except that the documentation for alot of this, particularly the RainLab Blog plugin, is quite bad. I also found a bug where blogPost.post.content_html only displays up to the first html tag, but blogPost.post.content gives you the whole thing. What??? huh???

Learning how to implement pagination, url slugs, etc was all kind of a nightmare. The blog plugin page has limited documentation and I couldn't find anything more concrete, so I had to read through the code of the component modules to see what the hell it was doing. The component modules were not exactly what I wanted so I had to write my own pages using similar logic.

Then, I was ready to move. So I tried installing OctoberCMS again on my main site and.... hit the same error I was getting originally, about InstalledVersions.php not being found. I don't fucking get it! I eventually just had to move all the files over, which did not work, becuase the .env file was still pointed at the old location. People on the OctoberCMS forums would have you believe moving a site to a different URL is not something you would ever want to do and you should use git! Well that doesn't solve the problem it's just a version control system, modifying a deployment to a different location is not the same thing as using git! 

October CMS also does the following things that are annoying:

The .htaccess file restricts access to subdirectories it doesn't own, which if you have other things on your webspace that need to be accessible, is bad, so you have to add each one of those to the exceptions.

The .env file has a debug value, which if you set to false, creates a cached version of things that run through "the combiner" like css and javascript. Well, if you edit a css file then that means the cache gets served and not the new one so what I had to do was take the css out of the combiner by editing the layout file default.htm and removing the square brackets around the stylesheet link.

It's been frustrating and weird.