I imported my existing Hugo blog, which was built from md files with yaml front matter, into a new site I built with Elements and CMS. It took a lot of power renaming, search and replace and some old-fashioned tedious editing, simply because the yaml had minor differences (e.g. whether you had to have a space after the : in the key-value pair) but getting the blog to work was fairly straightforward in the end. Elements CMS was happy to work with such things as “coverImage” or “showTitle” - simply accepting them as custom fields.
Today I spent a few hours getting to the point where I could use the tags the blog already contained. There is no tag list component yet, and I didn’t want to code one, so I made a custom html component for the page showing a biog item, using twig to loop through the tags (which are an array) and show them as links. The longest time was reverse engineering the code elements produces to apply the correct style to what the custom component output.
The links point to the “tag” page, which is the collection, but filtered by url.
Finally, I wrote another custom html component for the tag page to use a few lines of javascript to derive the tag from the url and display it as a title.
It’s way beyond using elements as it is usually used - I hope we’re going to get nicely styled components to make a tag list inside blog posts and a master tags list on the tags page, as well as a video showing how they work, but it’s working well enough for me, for now.
FWIW I’d still love to be able to handle categories - conceptually they’re not the same as tags (a post can be in only one category, but have several tags) and with my many year old blog, several sub-blogs over the years were merged by making them categories. I understand wanting to avoid the complication of two hierarchies for organising posts, but you could solve this if collections could be filtered by any field as well as the pre-defined filters. I can live with it if not.
If you want to see, it’s at http://www.curtisfamily.org.uk
