I’m finally getting back to keeping this site updated, and I’ve decided to stick with BOLT for the CMS backing.

In my previous gigs as an ISP/web developer I’ve done enough work on Wordpress sites, and have been bitten by enough wordpress bugs and plugin conflicts, to know that I didn’t want to use that as a backend for this site.

While I’m playing with (and am really liking) luapress for a couple of other sites, I’ve enjoyed using BOLT for a backend for this site for both it’s extensibility and simple sqlite based data storage. The only downside has been that I’ve never been satisifed with any of the existing templates/themes. There was always something that needed be tweaked going from one theme to the next. That being case, I purchased one from wrapbootstrap, rolled up my sleeves, and have started turning it into a bolt theme for this site.

Overall, it’s actually pretty easy - the hardest part is learning the syntax of the twig template engine, and figuring out what pieces bolt calls for each part of the various pages.

One added bonus that I’ve just started playing with is that the admin portion actually works well on a tablet, which should allow me to keep up with the posts and content while on the road.

Getting back to storing the data in sqlite - this enables us to make easy snapshot backups - you just need to copy the database file. This is much easier than dealing with sql dumps, especially if you are maintaining a small site. The load on the server should also be much lower.

One last point - we are running lighttpd as a web server, so we had to translate the apache based redirects into something that that lighttpd could use. Our current ones are as follows: