Migrating From Wordpress to Joomla, Part 1

Recently I migrated my main site from Wordpress to the CMS Joomla. While evaluating the potential of leaving Wordpress for a CMS, I found lots of information pertaining to migrating from various CMS’s to Wordpress, but little to no information about moving a site away from Wordpress. There were some web forum threads regarding such a move, but no FAQs to assist the move, and unfortunately, no script that would help automate such a process.

After spending three days preparing for as headache-free a move as possible, and one day spent nailing down some issues that arose after moving my test install to my root directory, I felt it may be of use to some to share some of the issues and solutions that I encountered when migrating from Wordpress to Joomla.

First of all, what would the motivation be to leave Wordpress in favor of one of the CMS solutions like Joomla? Wordpress has a huge community of developers, and there are lots of options for people looking to extend the functionality of the default Wordpress install. If there is an easier way to get a web site up and running than Wordpress, I haven’t found it. In addition, Wordpress makes managing content simple enough for even technophobes to master.

One issue with Wordpress is that no matter how much you customize your theme and content, your site will always look like a blog. While there is nothing intrinsically wrong with that, not every site is suited to the blog format. If you have a non-blog site published on a blog platform, you may risk damaging your site’s credibility in the eyes of your target audience. Ultimately, some sites are better suited to the blog style display, and other sites need a more traditional web site design in order to explore the possibilities available for organizing and displaying content.

This isn’t to say that you couldn’t have a blog running on any of the CMS’s, you can. A CMS will give you a lot of functionality that you probably won’t touch if you’re using it for blogging. On the other hand, using a CMS will give you some layout and feature options that either don’t exist, or will be easier to implement than they would be on Wordpress. Again, nothing I say in this article is meant to detract from Wordpress and it’s functionality. It’s solid software with a great community behind it. In fact, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Wordpress didn’t eventually evolve or fork into a full fledged CMS and the lite version that exists today.

In my case, my news section is absolutely best served by being dished up blog-style. However on a site that functions as a niche news portal, I felt that other aspects of the blog format were less flattering to my content. I felt constrained by the options provided to me by Wordpress, and very much felt that I was limited in the ways I could display my content.

So my search for a CMS began.

There are many open source and commercial CMS packages available, and they don’t necessarily share the same strengths and weaknesses. I eventually came to the conclusion that Joomla would be the direction I would go, if I went at all.

Joomla began as a fork off Mambo, an established CMS. In August 2005, the core developer team of Mambo left to form Joomla, citing that decisions made by the non-profit foundation that funded Mambo were made without consulting key stake holders and violated open source principles.

Joomla, like Wordpress, enjoys a large community of developers and users. In particular, extensions to core functionality are just as abundant on Joomla as they are on Wordpress, which was an important selling point to me.

One of the things that stood out when looking at the various CMS packages, was what a great looking web page Joomla rendered. Joomla templates are, like Wordpress themes, abundant.

Also like Wordpress, there are many ways for users to extend core functionality. Joomla handles extensions differently than Wordpress. In Joomla there are three paths to extending the core functionality; Components, Modules and Mambots. Joomla itself has many of it’s features implemented via these three types of extensions, and there are many third party add-ons. Components handle RSS feeds, sitemap creation, advertising banner display, etc., and often work in conjunction with a complementing module. Modules are bound to locations on the page, which are user specified. Examples of modules are RSS feed icon placement, Featured Articles, Popular Articles, etc.. Mambots are generally smaller, and function more like a traditional plugin. The basic rundown is that all three add functionality that is configurable via the admin back end, as if installed plugins were an intrinsic part of the CMS.

Having made the decision that Joomla was going to allow me to realize my vision for my website, I created a subdomain to install Joomla on so I could test it before going live. On my hosting account, like most hosts, Joomla was available to me as a Fantastico install. For those of you unfamiliar, Fantastico is a script located in your CPanel interface that provides a graphical front end for installing software on your web server. Fantastico makes installing and uninstalling packages as simple as two clicks of your mouse. With my site still running live on Wordpress, I entered the admin backend of Joomla to see what it allowed me to do.

Next week in Migrating From Wordpress to Joomla, Part 2, we’ll see if I found Joomla up to the tasks I wanted to accomplish with my content, and whether or not the transition was a smooth one. Or, would I end up cursing myself for breaking a perfectly good website?

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