Over the last few days I have been migrating Wargaming.info from Joomla to WordPress – for a variety of reasons – but needless to say it has required a reasonable amount of effort (and has been the third such major migration I have done in about 4 years in my quest to find the ideal platform). The site is now back up and running in its new environment, however it does unfortunately mean any external links to specific pages on the site will mostly be broken (while in Joomla I could load multiple aliases for pages, the by maintaining external links to old page addresses, I have yet to figure out how easily that can be done in WordPress). Also it may or not break RSS subscriptions – so you may need to reselect RSS notifications if you had these previously. So first of all my apologies to anyone this affects!
I have not as yet completed all work, but I wanted to get the new design up and running as soon as possible, so:
- Image Galleries embedded inside posts and articles aren’t currently working – I have yet to decide how to do these in WordPress. However I am looking at these over the next few days once I decide on the methodology – so apologies for their unavailability.
- Tags are not present except on new posts such as this one, it was not possible to migrate them from the old Joomla environment – I’ll be going back through all posts and tagging them in the coming weeks (a few each day) – expect all to hopefully done by early May.
- Links also are not here – again I couldn’t get these to migrate satisfactorily so will need to re-add these manually over time – but hopefully I will have the bulk of them back up soon!
- There’s also a bit of tidying up work to do with images – as many from the old environment have had tinted frame effects applied which are no longer compatible with the new environment’s colour theme. I’ll tidy these up as and when I can.
Otherwise I hope readers enjoy the new format and I’m hoping it’ll improve some functionality and assist me in adding more content regularly.
As someone who is contemplating replacing MS FrontPage with Joomla, for the three or four websites he controls, can I ask you what prompted the shift?
Is there some fundamental issue with Joomla, or is WordPress better in some fashion?
One of the reasons I’m dithering with my own change is that there is no easy way to convert all the FrontPage stuff to Joomla, so it’s all going to be done by hand. I’m also undecided as to how I want to handle pictures – there are a LOT on one of the sites I maintain, and I want a system that will be easier for me – preferably one that power users can use themselves. Any suggestions?
Hi John – To be honest my decision to change was a bit spur of the moment, however I had contemplated changing from Joomla to WordPress about 6 months ago and then postponed it as I felt WordPress was too restrictive (it was an early version 2 variant at the time IIRC)… However as time has passed I’ve decided that it is worth taking a punt on WordPress as I think it may serve me better long-term. Like you I have multiple sites (I have 6) and I have gone through the whole migration thing from Manual Coding & Early WYSIWYG editors (1995 to early 2000’s) to MS FrontPage 2003 (mid-2000’s) to MS Expression Web 1 & 2 (later-2000’s), to Joomla (since mid-2009), and now to WordPress in 2011.
As I have progression through each of the above ‘periods’ I’ve achieved an increased focus and quality on content and have not had my time soaked up by coding and design tasks to maintain the site and it’s navigation structure. As a result I’m focuses on using CMS/Blog type software for all my sites going forward. As regards which is better, my personal preference is leaning towards WordPress, however having said that I have 3 sites on Joomla and have only migrated one of the 3 – so I will continue to use Joomla (the 1.5 iteration) for some time yet. My other 3 sites are alls till on very old MS Expression Web designs or older and have been much neglected… 🙁
Anyway here are some quick pros and cons as I see them – note that all my experience is with Joomla 1.5 not the new 1.6 that just came out – whereas my WordPress install is 3.1.1 so is the latest version of WP, so bear in mind then new 1.6 Joomla has new features. One reason I migrated to WP is that the migration to Joomla 1.6 is half-way workload wise to migrating to WordPress, so if I was gonna change now was the time to do it:
JOOM PROs: Joomla has a lot more functionality out of the box – it can be a blog, static website, shop, etc. With a basic template you can do an awful lot. However the newer WP has a lot more of that now too depending on the Theme/Template you use.
JOOM CONs: Joomla tries to be too much to many people – as a result it’s a Jack of Trades and an Expert in None. Many things in Joomla need plug-ins added to work well and many plug-ins break other plug-ins or get broken if you change the template or such. Joomla has a reputation (note I cannot vouch for this personally) for Spaghetti Code whereas WordPress is seen as the ‘Apple’ of (free & open source) Blog & CMS software, it has better management and control of development resulting in cleaner tighter code and less things that can ‘break’ when you change a plug-in or such – But it’s still not as flexible overall IMO. Basically Joomla gives you more options & functions but is a bit more fragile and more work to manage/configure. NOTE: I use Artisteer normally for my template or theme design (it does Joomla, WordPress, Blogger, and other formats) and in Joomla it basically ‘broke’ half my plug-ins (whether because it or the plug-in wasn’t keeping to W3C standards) – but I had no such trouble in WP initially (although I subsequently changed to a third-party template for here anyway). Joomla is also supposed to be entirely W3C compliant and it isn’t – although the new 1.6 may be… I’ve also had endless issues with Meta Tags and Invalid Links in Joomla – this is because it doesn’t do very good SEF or SEO by default and needs to use plug-ins (it does simple SEF but you need the sh404SEF plug-in to do it properly with SEO) – it’s the same with Tags BTW (I used the “Custom Properties” plug-in) and these never quite get it right when it comes to Google optimisation (but that may just have been my environment as I did a lot of tweaking and changing of URL formats and such) – again the new 1.6 might address much of this.
WP PROs: WordPress has far better post formatting and tagging capability, and has nested categories rather than arbitrary hierarchy (note Joomla 1.6 now has the latter, and may have built in tagging too). WordPress is designed to make it easier and quicker to get material up on your blog or website and to automate formatting and such much more than Joomla IMO. WordPress is also considered much more stable and cleaner coded than Joomla as noted above in Joomla Con.
WP CONs: It is reported (again I can’t verify) that WP is as vulnerable as Joomla to hacking and perhaps in some ways more so. A couple of bloggers on the subject I came across stated that WP had some of the worst plug-ins around, both poorly coded and very insecure (making sites that used them more vulnerable to hacking). I also still think – from my impressions the last week getting this site live in WP that it’s still rather restrictive compared to Joomla.
IMAGES: I had images working pretty good in Joomla with a combination of the JCE WYSIWYG Editor and the SIG (Simple Image Gallery) plug-in. However WordPress in theory has all the same functionality (and more) integral to it although the Lightroom plug-in is required to get images to open in a java pop-up rather than the HTML – and it’s not working at present for me here 🙁 and I’m trying to figure out why (so WP isn’t perfect by any means)…
CONVERSION: WordPress has a pretty good migration plug-in to suck over Joomla *1.5* post/article content and categories (but not the parent sections – as this isn’t compatible with WP’s nested categories) – although in my case it screwed up the image paths so when it remapped them in WP it got the path wrong for some reason…
IMPORTING: Yep – with either there is no easy solution – My friend Kieran is going through the same debate now for his http://6mm.wargaming.info website – we just discussed it yesterday and he is going to go with WP I think – and is having to manually copy and paste each page’s content into a new ‘post’ or ‘static ‘page’ in WP. His coding is very clean CSS so he can bring most of his code with him – but in your case, like me, FrontPage & Expression Web put too much cr*p and non-compliant code in the source HTML – so you will likely have to do what I did originally and copy and paste the text only then reformat and insert your images. It’s a big task BUT you will have to do it sometime – so sooner the better and you want to go the way that gives you the best future-proofing for new developments…
CONCLUSION: This might all sound negative and overwhelming but it’s not – going to Joomla was the best thing I ever did – migrating to WP I hope will be even better – if it is I will slowly bring the other 2 Joomla sites over too. Neither is an outright ‘winner’ over the other – it just comes down to your preferences and whether your site(s) is/are just a bunch of static pages, or they are dynamic and/or you are regularly uploading new content… Having not seen Joomla 1.6 up close I can’t make a valid comparison for you as of right now – but if personal preference and ‘hunches’ are acceptable as indicators I’d go with WordPress myself if starting from scratch right now – it’ll seem daunting and complex but once you get the hang of it you’ll get your process pretty streamlined…
HTH
Thanks very much for the fulsome response! Very helpful
Can I impose on your time to ask about a specific worry I have?
Two of the sites I manage are effectively club sites, one being the local wargames club, and the other a local re-enactment regiment. Both feature a lot of pictures of events.
Since I don’t want to manage every update of these sites the way I have been with Front Page, I need to make sure that the final choice is easy for relatively non-technical users to update, which is why I started looking at CMS in the first place.
Joomla’s native handling of images is a bit clunky, especially since the batch upload doesn’t work in 1.5, but some of gallery add-ins, whilst I could get good results with them, would be a bit much for some of the people I expect to be content providers – especially when it comes to adding images to articles, rather than straight galleries. I looked at Simple Image Gallery, but it doesn’t seem to allow individual captions, something I’d need.
Can you give me any suggestions for Joomla,modules that might help here, or some insight into the way WordPress handles such things?
Thanks again for your response
John – no problem. First of all I used SIG myself in my Joomla Install – I’m using the PRO version 2.0.5 (I think it cost about US$30-$40 with 1 years support) and it works excellently and does do captions – when you generate a Gallery it creates a txt file in the image directory listing the images and coding each with a ‘desc’ tag – you then just copy and paste your text for each image into the tags. I used the free one originally but it broke and didn’t work after a while (not sure if it was my Artisteer Templates or a Joomla Upgrade). But the PRO version has much more functionality and supported whatever caused the free one to fail (I think it was Artisteer) – so was well worth the money. See http://www.joomlaworks.gr/content/blogcategory/0/42/ (I also use their Disqus extension for my other Joomla sites too).
I’ll respond further to the balance of your query when I have time in the next day or so…
John – continuing in reply to your query – firstly I haven’t had any issue with Joomla and image uploads – I haven’t used batch uploading but certainly the built in media manager upload works fine. It should be possible to create a separate user logon for each person, and have them have their own upload directory. Make sure you have the latest JCE for your WYSIWYG editor installed too – as this allows you to do image uploads and part of the insert image process… If you are wanting to have them upload content through the front end there are probably plug-ins especially for managing what the UI is like (e.g. simple or more extensive/advanced).
I always used FTP to upload all my images – so didn’t really explore any plug-ins or extensions in that area, other than as I said to make sure I installed the JCE editor for the back end article creation & edition. The version of JCE I have installed with Joomla 1.5 is 1.5.7.6 but there may be a newer version out.
If you are currently looking at Joomla 1.5 I’d strongly suggest you try 1.6 – yes there is only a limited number of available plug-ins & extensions right now, but that will grow exponentially as the developers update the existing ones – and I think waiting for those will be less effort than doing a 1.5 install & migration of your data and then having to do a second migration to 1.6 in 6 months, as 1.6 significantly changes how you can structure and organise things (e.g. nested categories like WordPress has had for sometime).
However having said that WordPress may be worth considering as it has an interface that may be better for minimum-skill-level users to upload media & post articles, I have only been using WordPress regularly for a couple of weeks now (and still trying to resolve why a couple of plug-ins aren’t working) but its operation is arguably slightly better than Joomla 1.5 in about 40%-60% of things and about the same but different elsewhere – however there are a few things Joomla 1.5 is still hands down better than WordPress 3.1.1 at! BUT the big difference is response – WP is snappier and more responsive in the back end, and I think my front end pages load faster for visitors too, which bears out the comment complaint that Joomla has buggy spaghetti coding whereas WP is supposedly more “Apple like” in it’s QC process and has cleaner, trimmer, more efficient code.
With WP you can just chuck in some text, upload from your PC or whatever the media, insert it straight into your post as a gallery and you’re done – you don’t need to worry about any basic HTML editing or such (e.g. setting paragraph tags, etc). I hope that helps but it’s probable my experience is not enough in the area you are looking at (i.e. multiple users accessing the site & uploading lots of images and/or media).
P.S. And make sure you do look at Joomla 1.6 and if possible try that compared to the latest WordPress 3.1.1. You can run either live at your web host (if they support them) and still have your existing site(s) in front – you just don’t enable the new index.php file that points to the CMS leaving your old static one there – so it won’t matter if you take 3 months to play round & decide then migrate your existing data into one or the other… 🙂
Thanks again for a really use pair of posts
The issue with Joomla 1.5 image upload is that the batch and zip uploads don’t work. This doesn’t bother me, since I’m happy to use FTP, but not many of the club committee members / regimental officers would be confident in doing that.
I tend to do prototyping and testing on my machine at home – I run a XAMPP install with Apache, MySQL, PHP, etc. When I came to go live with the Regimental site, I used Akeeba Backup to pack and then install the working site to it’s new home.
Anyway, you’ve given me a lot to think about: I’ve already got a download of Joomla 1.6 ready to try out, but I shall download WordPress as well this weekend, so I can make comparisons.
Thanks again for your help,
John Orange
No problem John – and good luck. If I think of anything further that might be pertinent I’ll pop it up here in another comment…
John – Just FYI – after about 3 weeks now of using WP fairly regularly everyday,and having got the various plug-ins sorted to get things working how I want, I must say I am now starting to find it a real pleasure to use over Joomla – it’s definitely much slicker and quicker/easier to add and maintain content (even if it does still have less features/options overall). And I’ll b emigrating my other 2 sites to WP over the next southern hemisphere winter, all going well…
Thanks for the update, John
I’ve got a working install of WordPress on my home machine, and I’m just starting to tinker with it.
Can I ask what Plug-ins, etc you have settled on? First impressions are that there are quite a lot of them to choose from!
Hi John – no worries – a friend has asked me that too so when I get 5 minutes I’ll email you direct with that info. Cheers, John.