Creating a WordPress version of the site was easy. I’ve now been working on it for seven and a half minutes, in which time I’ve installed WordPress and made copies of each of my three pages.
Both Joomla! and WordPress allow you to toggle between WYSIWYG and HTML editors, so it was simple to copy the Joomla! HTML version of each page to the WordPress HTML editor.
I still need to generate the WordPress theme from Artisteer and install it in WordPress, and also to create the three-item menu. Interesting to see how long that’ll take.
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The menu took about three minutes – I’ve never created a WordPress menu before but it’s very easy.
It took less than a minute to convert the Joomla! template to a WordPress theme in Artisteer. Just File-Change Template and then File-Export.
Another two minutes to upload and activate the new WordPress theme.
Now I have done all the work I expected to have to do, but the site still doesn’t look the same in WordPress. Differences are:
– The site name and slogan are WordPress – Just another WordPress site. They need to be customised.
– There’s a default home page that I don’t want and will have to remove
– There’s a blogging column on the left with ‘Recent posts’, ‘archives’ etc that I need to remove
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I dragged everything out of the ‘Primary Widget Area’ but the left column is still there.
I fixed this by going back to Artisteer, changing the theme to a single-column layout and re-exporting it. Then installing the updated version in WordPress. Time: seven minutes.
Joomla! ignored the left-hand column because I hadn’t put anything in it. Not so WordPress.
Changing the site name and slogan was easy to find in the general settings.
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I can’t see where the fourth, ‘Home’ menu item is coming from in the WordPress site. I only have three in the menu in the Admin page and one of them is called Home so I have two ‘Home’s. I tried loading the page in Firefox (I’d been using Chrome) but FF sees four menu items too so it’s not a cache issue.
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Fixed. In desperation I went into Appearance-Themes and in my current theme selected ‘menus’. I got a ‘theme locations’ box saying “Your theme supports 1 menu. Select which menu you would like to use.” Nothing was selected so I selected ‘Main’ (the only option) and when I refreshed the site the annoying extra menu option had gone away.
Total time for WordPress install and getting it to look like the Joomla! site: 36 minutes. I find WordPress fairly intuitive compared to Joomla! but of course learning a second CMS was bound to be easier.
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Grr – I spoke too soon! Unexpectedly, there’s an option to reply on the wp home page below the main text. Eh?? Also if you type in the URL directly the annoying default home page comes up, although I thought I’d deleted it.
Went into Appearance/Themes/Current Theme/Theme Options and turned lots of stuff off, which removed the option to reply.
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Deleted a post called ‘Hello World’, but the default URL now gives a ‘not found’ message. Sigh.
Think I’ve found it! In Settings-Reading there’s a ‘Front page displays’ setting. Funny place to put it I would have thought – I only looked there in desperation.
Total time taken is up to 54 minutes. Still under an hour so I am fairly happy with WordPress.
Now to run the speed tests!
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