This is part 2, the first part “Joomla as a blog tool” can be found here: http://einartysen.se/2009/12/blogger-joomla-wordpress/

On to part 2 – Changing to WordPress

After giving up on Joomla (I don’t like to admit it but that was the case) I figured it’s time to make it easy for myself. That’s why this blog runs on WordPress. Was it as simple that I imagined, after all I had never used it before? Actually yes. WordPress installation is quick, simple and straight forward. I think the actual blog was up and running in 10 minutes approximately. I won’t describe the installation here, http://www.wordpress.org gives you everything you need including instructions.

On to more interesting things, importing my blogger posts etcetera.

This wasn’t that much of a challenge either, I found this blog: http://hellosam.net/lang/en/post/397. That’s really all you need. Instead I will tell you what remains to be done.

Permalinks and pagerank from blogger. hellosam goes through this but in my quick quick attempt it didn’t work out. I haven’t found the time for more attempts, but that’s what holidays are for right? I’ll get back on the matter I think.

Layout. Right now I’m using a WordPress theme called iNove by NeoEase. I think it’s a fairly good looking one but…for one thing it’s a bit to fancy for me. The black shiny header just doesn’t seem quite right to me, neither does some of the objects in the right column. I actually tried to edit these already since I thought it would be a walk in the park. The only accomplished result is that I now have two identical archives :)
Need some time to look into this as well.

That’s it for now, but now that I wrote my migration posts I can start posting other fun stuff again!

So this is it, welcome to the new home of pinnapedia! The address changed and so did the platform, the author however is the same as always.

On to the fun stuff, changing platform! I have some previous experience working with an Open Source CMS (Content Management System) called Joomla. Joomla isn’t really made for blogs, it’s much more than that. So I was prepared on some workarounds, problems and obstacles. This is where my story begins…

Part 1. Joomla as a blog tool

Challenge was my first thought when I started looking at Joomla for the blog, I was right. For a couple of days this site actually held a fully working Joomla-blog! It’s not here anymore and of course there is a reason. I was never interested in paying for a blog plug-in so my experience is only from some free tools. First thing I did was to make a small list of what criterias I had for claiming success, it was something like this:

• Blog-like layout
• List for archived posts
• Support comments
• Some kind of categorizing similar to tags
• Static pages supplementing the blog
• No lack of feature compared to the old blogger (why would I then change?)

Bonus features

• Import from the old Blogger blog.

Joomla actually managed to give me most of this. The layout was a bigger problem than I could’ve imagined, there are lots and lots of free templates for Joomla out there but almost none aimed at blogging. With some template edits I managed ok but was never quite satisfied. Comments, Categorizing (and tags) was accomplished with a plugin called Lyfftenbloggie. Of the plugins I looked at this was by far the most competent. Still…the posting wasn’t that straight forward, the comments suffered from some bugs, the plugin limited my layout possibilities even more and the archive just looked like…a bag of junk.

I decided that it wasn’t worth it anymore, Joomla is not made for blogging and that was painfully obvious. Next time I’ll set up a full homepage though I’m quite certain that it will run on Joomla which is still my number one choice for CMS. This is where WordPress comes into the picture. Wait for Part 2 to get the full story on how I gave up and decided to take the short cut. Part two can be found here: http://einartysen.se/2009/12/blogger-vs-joomla-vs-wordpress-part-2/