BS-Squared: From Joomla to Wordpress
Monday, June 5th, 2006After a short nine months, BS-Squared has moved on yet again. This time, it’s to Wordpress. The Mambo/Joomla road proved to be a very difficult one, and following it was just too frustrating to stay put.
There is no single catalyst for this move, but rather, a significant series of requirements that just haven’t been met and won’t be met by Joomla for a very long time.
I will address these requirements one by one.
Blogging is the most common activity I participate in with this website. I’ve blogged since 2001, when blogging wasn’t even defined yet, and I’d edit HTML documents by hand to write in my blog. The current best way to blog in Joomla is to use the jd-wp (Joomla Developing-Wordpress) component by Predator: arguably one of the better free components for Joomla. This December, 2005 creation brought most of the coolness of Wordpress to the relatively blogless world of Joomla.
What didn’t it bring? Unfortunately, it didn’t bring with the amazingly crisp Search Engine Friendly (SEF) URLs which make Wordpress such a neat blogging tool. Also, the content and categories of the Wordpress blog were contained within the Wordpress database tables, so anything having to do with Joomla content was natively unavailable…. like content mambots.
SEF didn’t seem important at first because my custom CMS, even though crappy looking in retrospect, had really good PR (Page Rank) for a personal site because of my friend, mod_rewrite. Joomla SEF was nothing but headaches to work with. All of the solutions were too hard on the database, required too much manual intervention, or required already-overworked 3PDs (3rd-party developers) to modify their extensions to generate SEF URLs. I found myself often getting 0 for PR with thousands of incoming links and just plain green with envy whenever I’d see a Drupal or Wordpress site with tons of content, all of which had high PR because of competent SEF.
One of the things that sealed by decision to move was hearing that reliable Joomla core SEF would not be added until version 2.0, which is a long way off, considering that 1.5 beta isn’t out yet.
Permanent Links were a huge concern of mine as well, as they go hand in hand with SEF. You want your pages to have clever names that never change. Wordpress and Drupal have these…so does Joomla…for now. But I’m very concerned about what Joomla 2.0 will bring as far as different URLs when they finally get around to implementing SEF. New URLs mean new PR, page age of 0, and possibly duplicate content.
Those reasons being said, I think that Joomla has a very bright future with it’s ever-growing userbase thanks to its ease of use and the slow death of Mambo. I keep up on the Drupal forums all the time, and they’re always talking about how they can make their interface as easy as Joomla’s to grab more market share. Joomla is a clear winner for the masses. It just doesn’t meet my needs anymore.
I’m going to continue to develop BSQ Sitestats, JoomlaLib, and help out with the Gallery2 Bridge, as those are great products with many loyal users. Hopefully, I’ll be able to bring a lot of the advantages Wordpress currently has to Joomla via current and future extension projects. The possibilities are endless.
July 31st, 2006 at 8:02 am
Brent;
Very valid arguments to the switch from J to wp. I’d have to agree with most (if not all) of those current and potentially looming shortcomings with joomla’s content infrastructure and SEF.
I can’t speak for Marko (jd-wp) but I myself would like very much to have the interchangeable option of using both or either in respect to developing client projects. Both have significant strengths (joomla offers very strong if somewhat over-optioned content management) and, as you mentioned, WP excels at reader retention and virality. It would be wonderfull -if- we could have the best of both those worlds in one modular package.
best of luck, look forward to BSQ for WP.
-vis
August 13th, 2006 at 7:10 pm
I agree with Visualweb but i also think that 3pd integration is never possible to be fully integrated as each one of them has it’s own ways of handling things as a system itself.
What really needs to be done for a seamless integration would be to create your own one which only runs natiely on Joomla. We see that Joomblog is an example but no where near as good as WP. But maybe more time should be spent on this than to try and force WP to run seamlessly on J!?
As for SEF, it really needs to be improved considerably as you correctly pointed out.
Just a side note, apparantly, Marko has gotten permalinks to work on the next release of WP-JD for friendly URLs. You can see it in action over at: http://www.open-sef.org/blog/
Anyway, i’ve finally gotten round to using your BSQ Stat. Looking pretty neat so far, thank you.
September 3rd, 2006 at 3:24 am
Hi, I’m using Joomla at the moment and I really think that CMS is great, but way to powerfull to be used as just a blog.
How did you do the convertation? I’ve searched the net over and over for a working solution (the link to the script provided by wp.org is broken).
September 3rd, 2006 at 7:29 am
Powerful isn’t the word I’d use. Joomla has different goals and is just not the right fit for blogging.
I was using JD-wordpress, which has the same database table format as Wordpress 2.x, so I just renamed the tables and changed the preference tables to point at the new site location. No problems!
September 6th, 2006 at 2:56 pm
Hey Brent - how about a feature like THIS for your stat component?
http://clustrmaps.com/index.htm
That would be COOL!
Thanks for all your work in the Joomla world - I for one am happy to hear you’re going to keep hanging around.
November 6th, 2006 at 8:21 pm
Hi Brent, I’ve got a wordpress site that I’d like to update to joomla without having to go to all the trouble of posting all the pages again. The site has over 200 pages, so this would be quite a job as you could imagine. I’m using both the latest wordpress and joomla updates.
Please give me your thoughts
November 6th, 2006 at 10:03 pm
I actually went from Joomla to Wordpress, so you’re looking for the opposite of what I did.
Brent
February 15th, 2007 at 3:23 pm
Brent,
Our church has a Joomla site that is, how you described, a “difficult little road”. I’d love to get it over to Wordpress, but am really afraid that all the info and articles would be lost in the shuffle.
Did you lose info when you moved over? What steps did you take to switch? Would you mind emailing me about this?
Thanks, David
February 13th, 2008 at 11:26 am
I searched for wordpress and Joomla issues and stumbled upon this discussion.
I’m using the Joomla CMS for my blog and I’ve installed the mojoBlog component (which is Wordpress converted for Joomla). This allows me to incorporate important Wordpress plugins in my mojoBlog and use content-related Joomla mambots at the same time. It’s the best of both worlds.
I restructured my template to match a Wordpress-style blog and I’m using several modules.
March 27th, 2008 at 8:41 am
Its a shame to hear that you moved from joomla. Of course moving on a year you will know that joomla is now in the 1.5v and myblog and jomcomment can provide an excellent blogging platform.
It may be worht looking into.
Azzam
April 30th, 2008 at 1:33 am
Hi there, Brent
I intend to migrate to Wordpress from Joomla! 1.5. I’ve been googling up and down for hours and still I didn’t find any piece of information on this issue. Rather, I found an article on how to migrate from Joomla! 1.0 to Wordpress. I’m just afraid my posts and articles will be lost during migration…