Brief: Migrate site from Joomla to WordPress
Client: The Oxygen Factory
Skills: E-Commerce, Genesis, Joomla, WordPress, WP e-Commerce
The Oxygen Factory are both friends and clients of mine and for a number of years I’ve been looking after their Joomla based site and Virtuemart Store as a maintenance client (don’t ask me, I only generally only do this for friends and longstanding clients… seriously, you basically just want me to make your theme for you…).
Unfortunately, most of that maintenance meant invloved cleaning up after site hacks and troubleshooting shipping on their store… with occasional tweaks to improve functionality or change the odd layout.
Now, I know Joomla is a quality program in many ways, but it just was never a good fit, either for me or the Oxygen Factory, and so when Belinda threw up her hands in frustration at yet another call from a frustrated buyer she asked me what I’d do.
I said move to WordPress (like duh, what did you expect me to say?).
So that’s what we did (which was a complicated business) but with a little bit of help from http://gconverter.com/ and Anthony at Maddison Designs we managed to migrate a rather large site from Joomla to WordPress, set up a shop and strip and clean up the HTML all in about 2.5 weeks.
There were very few changes to the design, but there was lots of tidying up required, as well as some re-jigging of how the posts/pages displayed but all in all, with the addition of Gravity Forms to manage the large booking form, WP e-Commerce for the shop and Backup Buddy to handle the migration (seriously, I cannot rave about that plugin enough) we’re now up and running, and looking good.
And Belinda reported happily this morning that in less than 12 hours on the new site they have their first sale… and it came with no complaints!
WordPress for the Win!!
Joomla or WordPress both are good