User Experience Report: Publii, Day 1

This is going to be a fairly brief, by my standards, post.

Rebuilding a portfolio site from scratch is a time-consuming task. While I considered building one from scratch with plain old HTML, CSS, and Bootstrap, I realized that wasn't practical. So I looked for a Content Management System that was free and could upload to Github pages.

And I found Publii, which is all those things, and locally hosted!

In terms of User Interface and Experience, I much prefer it to WordPress. That's simply because Publii isn't at the stage where it has tons and tons of settings and add-ons to configure. It's got the essentials, some nice to have features, good layout, and good documentation.

It's good enough, and I'm fine with that.

There are some oddities when working with themes though. I'm currently using the free version of the Persona theme, and some of the color options don't do what you expect.

For one thing, I set the link hover option to a shade of green, and the text to a shade of blue. But on the nav menu and author names, the colors are reversed. (I think it looks good, so I'm not complaining, but it is weird.)

The animated line's color was controlled by a "Color" setting - that's right, no real details, just the word "Color". Luckily, I didn't do anything horrible in changing it, but the lack of clarity was a definite knock on the theme. The inability to further customize the animation is annoying, but perhaps that an exclusive feature of the paid themes.

Speed and performance of the software is good, and I greatly appreciate the ability to choose "Save draft" as an option before I save anything I post.

One limitation of the software is that it seems excessively blog focused. You can't actually make a standard page. You just make posts, and then use a specialized page to show off all the posts with a specific tag. It's quite odd, but not a huge negative.

One huge positive is the fact that I can actually set the width of various elements quickly and easily. So no huge amounts of wasted space on my site!

In terms of content, it's a mixed bag. Even though I have backups of most of my previous content from my old UXZone.io site, it's not in an easily importable format. So It'll be a slow process of getting the old content extracted from the backup and converted to the new site.

But hey, at least I didn't lose it all!