Everything's new in … July

It's done! As of today, the new “KOMA-Script and Friends” website can be found at komascript.de. All remaining pages from the old "KOMA-Script Documentation Project" have either been adapted for the How-To pages in the Wiki, formatted for new friends or the blog, moved to the archive, or deleted as not worth keeping. To be clear: The old pages are now truly and genuinely gone.

The new “KOMA-Script and Friends” or “KOMA-Script und Freunde” no longer uses a dynamic CMS where pages are retrieved from an SQL database and processed via PHP. Instead, everything is generated as static pages using Hugo. Nevertheless— at least on komascript.de—search functionality is still available. For this, Fuse.js is used. The search index is also generated statically when the pages are built.

One advantage of static pages for the user is that the pages are generally delivered quickly. An advantage for me is that, with the elimination of the CMS layer, potential entry points for hackers are also eliminated. For example, the “KOMA-Script Documentation Project” had been under attack for weeks with a dictionary or brute-force attack targeting the admin account. Such attacks are now completely futile. Furthermore, there is no longer any dependency on specific PHP versions.

One common advantage is that the pages can be easily transferred to another server. This made it possible, for example, to mirror them on SourceForge. However, the search function does not work there due to a limitation of the web server. This is a known issue, and a feature request has been submitted. So if you’d like to have the search function there as well, you should support this request. SourceForge also doesn’t offer the option to define your own error pages. For unknown pages, you’ll see the standard SourceForge error page.

A minor drawback for me is that there are no longer any statistics on page views. So I don’t know what people are interested in and what they aren’t. However, considering the significantly lower amount of effort I have to put into maintenance, I can live with that just fine.

Since, during the transition from the “KOMA-Script Documentation Project” to “KOMA-Script and Friends,” the new pages on komascript.de were available via the about/ subdirectory, I set up a corresponding redirect for a certain period of time.

A major improvement from the old “KOMA-Script Documentation Project” to the new “KOMA-Script and Friends” is that the pages are available in both German and English. To switch languages, simply expand the currently displayed language in the left-hand menu and then select the other language. However, particularly in the archive and on the blog, not all pages are available in both languages.

I’m satisfied for now and hope that users will also be able to manage just fine.

So long
Markus

P.S.: Just like with various other pages here on “KOMA-Script and Friends” DeepL was helpful in translating this blog post.