In January 2008 I started transitioning content from my handcrafted legacy website to a modern content management system (CMS) website. I wanted an easier way to post content and for readers to post their own comments. Features that were long on my to do list but I never got around to programming. It didn’t make sense for me to reinvent the wheel. My co-workers at Google recommended Joomla as the best CMS available. Setting up the blank Joomla website was the easy part. Moving content from the old website to the new website soon came to a grinding halt and was left undone for three years.

Although a powerful CMS with a steep learning curve, Joomla doesn’t include a native blogging and comment component. I ended up paying for those features from a third-party component provider that were adequate but awkward to use. Although much easier to use than my legacy website, I never really enjoyed blogging on Joomla. When Joomla 1.6 went into beta testing last year, it still didn’t have a native blogging and comment component. Worst, there was no migration from version 1.5 to version 1.6. If I went with version 1.6, I would have to transition from both the legacy and version 1.5 websites.

Again, I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel.

When I decided to set up a writing blog for my author website last year, I started looking at the alternatives and decided to install WordPress on a subdomain. Although it can be used as a CMS, WordPress was designed to do blogging exceptionally well. I was no longer fighting the little quirks that prevented me from getting something up on the website. I soon fell in love with blogging again.

Setting up WordPress on a test subdomain, I spent the last month transitioning both the legacy and Joomla websites over. Now that everything was copied and pasted over, all 222 blog posts and 707 pictures since 1999 are now back up on the Internet for the first time in three years. I still need to clean up the old posts that were written long before the word blogging came into existence, fix all the broken links, and add all the categories and tags to find stuff. I’m hoping to get that done in the next month or so. Considering how easy WordPress is to use, that shouldn’t be a problem this time around.