https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll/wiki/blog-migrations
P.S.: I have migrated a few days ago myself from Posterous to Octopress. It was a piece of cake.
What about non-technical users? Multi-author blogs? Idiot-proof extensibility? Updates from phones and tablets? Huge sites with thousands of posts? Editorial and review systems? Access to thousands of cheap or free themes?
The ideal static site user is in a pretty privileged group. Most WordPress users would be better off securing WordPress and using a caching plugin that gives them the benefits of a powerful, dynamic platform while serving static files with automatic serverside compilation: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache/
At the very least, it needs something like http://prose.io/ on top of it, and since their website keeps not working, you don't want to put all your eggs in one basket, if shit hits the fan.
WordPress
1) Beginner friendly
- One doesn't need to be a coder or mess with cmd to use it.
- Abundance of tutorial(text/audio/video)
- You can host it anywhere, even for free. FTP? I know that from work.
- Hosting provider even install it for you
- Expert support is all over the web
- Drupal and Joomla can't beat WordPress new user adoption, why? They're made to be customized(more developer-centric). Too much option is apparently not good for new user.
2) Features
- Need something? there's plugin for that
- People/visitors loves nice design/layout, WordPress have thousands of themes
- Secure. Attacked by some random ddos/script kiddies? Hosting provider will take care of it. Malicious code? same case.
Static site generator.
1) Beginner friendly
- Yes, at least if you're familiar with cmd.
- Most tutorial suggesting Amazon S3/CDN/cloud etc. Well those service are inaccessible to many.
- Write new post, generate, upload...complicated!
- Lets embed image/audio/video with one-click...nope!
- Lets edit old blog post... oh why art thou so hard
- Lets try it on my phone, nope!
2) Features
- I want to add Facebook comment, how? Read the manual, download that, configure...blabla. No thanks
- Lets add analytics code. Edit template and insert this javascript, save and regenerate...blabla. No thanks
Conclusion : it might be a piece of cake for you but not to most people. Remember "most user are idiot"?. If I want to have simple static blog with nice editor I would use Blogger. Dumping random text? I have pastebin for that. Static site generator sure is attractive but we are just not there yet.
I have a feeling that 'campaign' to promote static site generator to WordPress user is strikingly similar to Windows-to-Linux campaign. It just never going to happen for most user, at this rate.
> - Most tutorial suggesting Amazon S3/CDN/cloud etc. Well those service are inaccessible to many.
Because you just need to serve static content, there are more options than for Wordpress, incl. Google and Github.
> - Write new post, generate, upload...complicated!
Not at all:
1. Create a new post: rake new_post["title"]
2. Edit using your favorite editor
3. Sync: rake deploy
There are tags for that, i,e, {% img /img/pic01.png %}
> - Lets edit old blog post... oh why art thou so hard
You can edit any post. They are in folders sorted by year and month.
> - Lets try it on my phone, nope!
Correct.
Conclusion: Blogging this way seems complicated, but is isn't if you are really doing it. Please try it for sake of a faster and safer Internet.