It’s fairly late right now but I’ve finally finished the conversion and wanted to explain the second major change to the site.

GearAdrift was originally designed using Wordpress blogging software, but due to my lack of knowledge (at the time) of php and theming, I was quickly overwhelmed in trying to create a custom theme and integrate the old forum. I recluctantly converted the site over to Joomla and had a custom theme designed that worked great in the beginning.

I’ve come to realize that this was a mistake. Joomla is a great CMS for beginners but is very limited in it’s true functionality. I won’t get into the main problems here but it involves the ease of code manipulation versus Wordpress. Basically, I’ve come to realize that there is nothing that can be done with Joomla that can not be done with Wordpress (and a little scripting).

I do want to give a shout out to Chris at rangit.com for this very helpful post on migrating Joomla to Wordpress.