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So, What’s Going On?
By Marc | January 28, 2008
This isn’t going to be one of our usual posts, but I should give you a heads up on the changes here.
We have forsaken Joomla for Wordpress.
All of the posts are transferred over using this amazing process. (The last few weeks had to be done manually.) There are some glitches here and there, though that will be addressed as time allows:
- Most of the posts have myself listed as the author and still have a {mosimage} tag instead of the picture that should be there. I will have to go through every post to fix them. They will also be split in to categories and will use tags.
- The design needs work. We’re using the default Wordpress template now. I will find a template and alter it to suit our tastes. I’m hoping something a little airier.
- The comics no longer appear here for now. I want to use a plugin that allows me to present “One of a Hundred” in a more traditional way, rather than as pages in an article. I need to figure out how to do that so that it doesn’t post on the main page. I want to try Comicpress, but it puts itself on the main page, I would need to tinker. The other artsy things will appear here as I find places and ways to present them.
Okay. Why did we switch? We liked Joomla and it has a lot to offer as a CMS, but it wasn’t right for what we’re doing. Since we’re more of a blog now, There were too many features that we didn’t need. Also, so many basic things were add-ons (like comments).
We were restricted on where we could place ads. Our primary goal here is sharing our faith and trying to be a light. But we do need funds to pay for hosting and domain registration. We also don’t mind the prospect of getting paid for our efforts. Ads could only really appear around the edges (where nobody looks). Wordpress allows us more freedom.
I had a problem with getting search engine friendly URLs with Joomla. They have an option for it, but it didn’t work well for me, so I turned it off. It’s kind of hard to remember a series of characters that have no relevance to your post. Plus they didn’t translate well with auto-fill social bookmarking, so we stopped bothering with those.
Wordpress offers more with SOE (search engine optimization) fairly easily and almost all “right out of the box”.
Don’t get me wrong, Joomla is a fine application, but it seems more suited for a business than a blog.
Also, if you added comments, I’m sorry to say they didn’t make the transition.
We’ll keep you posted and tomorrow will probably have something hopefully worth reading.
Topics: Site News | 2 Comments »
February 1st, 2008 at 7:16 pm
I’m glad to see the script worked for you. I am just wondering which plugin you were using for comments? I was using joomlaboard and will be working on a script to move joomlaboard comments over to wordpress.
February 4th, 2008 at 11:38 am
Thank you so much for the script. I was so afraid before of moving over and having to reconfigure everything again. You saved me many hours of work!
I’m pretty sure I was using Joomla Comment for comments. We only had a handful of comments, so it’s not a huge loss.
Good luck on the new script!