I had tried upgrading Pelican once or twice over the years and had problems that I don't remember anymore. Today it went surprisingly smoothly but instead of starting with my existing setup, I installed Pelican 4.11.0 using uv to a new directory, then copied over my markdown files. I edited the new pelicanconf.py file with a few things from the old one and we were up and running.

The toughest part was getting Netlify to stop looking for Python 3.7. More on that in the next article.

Unfortunately, as part of the research into Pelican, I see that the newest theme is 6 months old and most are 6, 7, even 9 years old. I have a lot of appreciation for good web design and very little ability to do it, so having options for themes that I don't have to do myself is important. It's one of the many reasons why WordPress is so popular, that they have so many good themes.

Looking at the documentation for Pelican, it looks like it's competing in functionality with Hugo with all the features that are possible. The fact that Go is so much faster than Python makes that a tough battle, even if Python is more accessible to people.