Migrating From Wordpress to Joomla, Part 2
Wordpress is a fantastic tool for managing your blog. Whether you just want to get a theme up and start writing, or if you want to get elbow-deep in css and customize your site’s look and layout, Wordpress makes it exceedingly easy to do so. A certain amount of flexibility has to be sacrificed to achieve such ease of use, and Wordpress, great as it is at what it does, is not the answer for every web site.
Enter the CMS. Content management systems abound, and offer layout and user management features either impossible or difficult to implement in Wordpress. My search for a CMS began when I started feeling claustrophobic in Wordpress, and also didn’t want my non-blog site to look so, well, bloggish.
After looking around to see what my options were, I decided on Joomla, which is an evolution of the established CMS Mambo. Last time in Migrating From Wordpress to Joomla, Part 1 I set the stage, now let’s find out how my migration from Wordpress to Joomla went:
First off there is, at this time, no script or tool that will import your existing Wordpress content into a Joomla installation. This would be daunting if your existing Wordpress site had been around for a while and had loads of content. In my case, the site I was moving had only been around for 2 1/2 months, so the amount of content to be transferred was manageable. Since there was no automated migration path, I had to write completely new content pieces for my Joomla site, copy my old Wordpress content, and paste in the Joomla content editor. Ad nauseum.
The first problem that I ran into was that the default wysiwyg editor in Joomla preserved incoming html and style information as text, which meant that all my inline html and css were visible in the article now. Ok, I never liked the wysiwyg editor in Wordpress, I wouldn’t use it in Joomla either.
Switching to the Joomla plain text editor, I transferred all my articles over and edited the created dates so they would remain the same as they had been. That done, I immediately saw that the Joomla plain text editor, unlike Wordpress, required line break tags for new paragraphs to appear in the finished articles. I switched back to the wysiwyg content editor and put line breaks back into all of my content. Phew, I’m not terribly bright, but thank God I thought to do all this stuff before I went live, this is a pain in the %$#.
I should mention that there are several third party wysiwyg editors for Joomla. I found and fell in love with Wysiwygpro, which is insanely nicer than what Wordpress or Joomla give you. It’s commercial, but it’s so nice that it’s worth considering even though there are serviceable free alternatives. There is also a Wordpress version of it in addition to the Mambo and Joomla versions. In addition to providing a graphical interface for browsing your image directory (nice), Wysiwygpro allows you to retain or strip style info from content you’ve copied from an outside source. Nice touch that would have made my migration a little easier.
Ok, now my content is there and looks like it should. Hmmm, I need to add to my category structure to allow for some more specific grouping. Huh?! What do you mean Joomla doesn’t support more than one tier of child categories??? No, I must be missing something. No, you can’t do child categories in Joomla. Grrrrrrr. God *%@#@ mother $%^$# those &$%@!
Ok, the way that Joomla organizes content is by Sections and Categories. A category can be a child of another category in a menu, but to have a genuine parent-child relationship you need to use both section and category, which you need to assign to content during content creation anyway. It’s different than Wordpress, and it tripped me up for a minute. The only major drawback I can see is for sites with lots of content that have arcane category structure. Joomla limits you to a single parent-child relationship, so if you need a three or four deep category structure, you will have to figure out how to divide up your content some other way. For my purposes I could have a parent Audio section, and within that division I could have Loudspeaker, Receiver and Separates categories, but I didn’t see a way to do sub categories. If I wanted to go Audio>Loudspeakers>Subwoofers I was out of luck, because Joomla limited me to two-tier relationships. Ok, limiting, but not a deal breaker.
Content ready, I found that working with my Joomla template was pretty easy, and had Adsense and Analytics up and running in no time. I had been using an external click tracking service for my one private sponsor to be a good Google citizen and for click auditing, and was happy to see that Joomla not only tracked clicks with it’s built-in banner functionality, it did a search engine friendly redirect to the advertiser so there was no offending paid link on my pages. Nice.
Now I had to make my urls search engine-friendly. The default url structure in Joomla is http://yoursite.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogsection&id=7&Itemid=26. Joomla has SEF urls built-in, but they give you an equally meaningless http://yoursite.com/blogsection/view/7/26/ url structure. We want to turn that into http://yoursite.com/section/category/item. Fortunately there are several third party SEF url solutions available for Joomla, and I had my urls SEF and usable in no time flat.
Ok, I had things pretty much working the way they should. It was time to move my test subdomain to my root directory and go live. I went through my mental check list to make sure I wasn’t forgetting anything important before I proceeded, backed up my web site just in case, uninstalled Wordpress via Fantastico (now my heart rate is starting to increase a little) and moved the Joomla install into public_html. I hand edited Joomla’s configuration.php to reflect the new location on my web server, and voila, my new Joomla site was live!
I gingerly poked and prodded my new Joomla site, expecting weird behavior and lots of work. To my delight the move only created two problems for me.
First, the SEF urls I just set up were no longer working, and everything but my home page resulted in a 404. Obviously this appeared like a huge problem initially. I disabled SEF urls, and everything worked, so at least my content was there while I ran down the problem. I never did figure out what went wrong, and ended up uninstalling and reinstalling the SEF url component I was using, which fixed the issue.
Ok, I still had one significant issue to fix. My RSS feed was useless. The feed ran off the site’s front page. My content wasn’t on the front page, never saw the front page unless I deemed it necessary to put it there, therefore, my new content wouldn’t get syndicated. Hmm, that’s a problem.
Looking into this a little I saw that the Joomla RSS feed only ran off the front page content, period. Well this sucks, I have no feed. My feed! My feed!
Not wanting to lose the three readers I had 
I did some investigating.
Fortunately there was a third party solution that allowed me to assign what went into my feed. Ok, now I have a feed, but this piece of $#@! is stripping all the html out of my feed, so all my content is one big paragraph with no images and looks awful. Again, not wanting to lose my three feed readers, I persevered, and after editing a couple .php files, I had a fully functional feed with pictures and line breaks, just like the big sites.
After the work spent getting ready for the move, I was treated to a relatively headache-free migration. The problems I did run into were overcome quickly. I was pleased, to say the least, that I didn’t break anything and that the move was as easy as it was.
How do I feel about the grass now that I’m on the other side of the fence? It’s green.
I’m really happy actually. Joomla gives me a web site that is closer to the vision that I had for it than it was when it was a Wordpress site. Nothing’s perfect, and for every area where I think Joomla crushes Wordpress, I could give you an example of something that I think is implemented better in Wordpress. Joomla gave me the ability to have a web forum that exactly matches the style of my web site, which will be really nice if my three RSS subscribers ever sign up for my forum.
The nicest unexpected surprise is the effect Joomla has had on my pageviews and time spent on site. Both have exploded since the move. The frontpage adds a pageview, but I am getting a lot more per visit. Either Wordpress gave my visitors the impression that I didn’t have too many places to go, or Joomla makes it look like I have more content. The numbers are great: +57% increase in pageviews/visit, and +33% time spent on site/visit since the move to Joomla.
So if you are looking at maybe going to a CMS, give Joomla a look. Great features, great community, lots of extensions available, and it makes a great looking page. I would advise holding off until 1.5 is final, because 1.0 and 1.5 aren’t completely compatible, so if you go now, like I did, you may have another headache in a month or two when it’s time to upgrade to 1.5. Oops. Oh well, looks like I’ll be back next month with Upgrading from Joomla 1.0 to 1.5.
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Comment by Dave Spathaky on 29 April 2008:
I think what you get with Joomla is the ability to set up a ‘multi blog’ site which is what I want to aim for. You can designate all any article to appear as ‘front page news’ but they actually end up in their own ’section’ (as they are known in Joomla).
Kevin Kelly’s site at kk.org is a good example of this. Under an umbrella of the domain he actually runs several different topic blogs.
I hope to go in this direction with may be small ‘intro’ paragraphs appearing on the front page for stuff I think will be of general interest.
Difficult to get your head around but I think Kevin Kelly has got it right but then he *is* one of the grand-daddys of the wired world.
Comment by Hummerbie on 29 April 2008:
A better RSS Feed option is the DS Syndicate Component, because you don’t need to hack any core php files, and you can set up numerous Feeds if you want to and run them through feedburner.
DS-Syndicate gives you full HTML layout in the feed including Pictures and lets you choose any section of category you want.
Comment by mlankton on 28 April 2008:
RD RSS
Comment by Dave Spathaky on 25 April 2008:
Thanks for this insight into migration. I wopuld love if you could name a few names and elaborate on what you actually did. I realise this isn’t the aim of the article but maybe more of a ‘how to do it’ would be nice.
Which one?