Written by Robert Vining | 04 July 2011
I created a site called JoomStew.com a little over a year ago that uses Wordpress blog software to run it. When I started the site, I fully intended for it to be a place where I could blog about things within the Joomla community that didn't really have a place here on my business site.
I threw it together in about 8 hours with just some tweaks of the template and a nice new logo I created. That's the logo you see there on the right.
It wasn't long after the site went live, that a good friend of mine, Amy Stephen, asked if I might want to start a series of Podcasts about a book that had just been released by Jono Bacon called The Art of Community. You can actually download the entire book as a PDF, free of charge on Jono's site.
Jono is the Community Manager for Ubuntu, another Open Source software project, and the book covers a lot of good topics on how to create and manage a large Open Source community, or any type of online community really.
We set out doing a chapter each week from the book, and invited guests from the Joomla leadership and community to discuss how that week's chapter applied to our community within Joomla. It was a lot of fun and we built up a pretty good audience due to the guests we had each week.
The series lasted 11 weeks, closing with the book's author, Jono Bacon, as our guest for the final show. It turned out great, but Amy decided her podcasting days were numbered.
I had to decide what I wanted to do with the Podcast, and as it turns out, I really enjoy doing the show, so I decided to find a new co-host. Enter Alice Grevet, a co-editor of mine at the Joomla Community Magazine, Alice had some experience doing podcasts, and accepted my invitation to continue JoomStew Radio.
Fast forward about a year now, and the show has taken a few weeks off here and there, but for the most part has remained a weekly podcast about various topics related to the Joomla community and the people that make their living with it.
We like to do 4-week series on a specific topic, from running your business to templates or extensions. We usually have 2 to 3 guests on a 1-hour show, and we've also brought in Alice's good friend and business partner Dianne Henning to help with interviews and the News segment of the show. It's a great resource of information with some of the industries top experts as guests each week.
There's just one problem. Our show is about Joomla, and the site is using Wordpress!
Man, do we take a lot of heat for that… so we decided it's high time we did something about it. Dianne thought it might be a good idea to share our experience with you on how to migrate a Wordpress blog to the Joomla CMS since we're going to be doing the work anyway. She suggested a Website Case Study for the Joomla Community Magazine, but I thought it might be a better idea to blog about it as we go, so you get the full effect of what all is involved in such a project.
Now before we get too deep into the nuts and bolts of it, I want to try to give you an outline of what we plan to do, so I'm going to put together a Project Outline for you as a PDF, and post it here on the blog with my next post. I'm hoping to keep you updated a few times a week as to our progress. Did I mention we do JoomStew Radio for free in our spare time? Same with this migration.
If you have any questions, don't hesitate to let us know in the comments and wish us luck, we're going to need it!
