We’ve changed our blogging platform!

You might know we use Joomla as the main CMS (Content Management System) for providing our customers with their websites.  Joomla is a great platform and fits well for the majority of our Charities and Christian organisations.  Sure we also build bespoke websites and we build sites based on other platforms but in the main we use Joomla.  However I’ve been wondering of late whether this is the best platform for everything we do.  You know we strive to provide Churches, Charities and Christian organisations with the best advice and capabilities at great value so I’ve recently been looking at blogging.

Now blogging is a great thing.  It allows you to give your site visitors a quick picture of what you’re doing or if you’ve more time an in depth analysis of a subject.  This is what made me build a blog recently using Joomla.  I published a heap of articles for that blog (you can view them under the Starters heading at the side) however I never felt the experiment in blogging was going well.  Rather I thought that Joomla was a bit clumsy to use and frankly not a great experience.  I had to work hard to make the thing work the way I wanted and getting it set up was difficult.  I might even post a blog on what to do at some point if you want to use Joomla for blogging for a Church website or a Christian website.

So I embarked on a bit of a journey to look at what might work more smoothly and not surprisingly I came upon WordPress.  Now I know your thinking why use Joomla at all if you want to do blogging you should have gone straight to wordpress.  Well the answer lies in the other capabilities that Joomla has.  It’s more for building websites with a ton of features.  It allows you to build webpages rather than blog pages.  This is probably a whole post on it’s own!

Anyway I decided that I’d simply install WordPress with Joomla and that’d solve the problem and boy was that hard!  However you dear reader are now seeing the fruits of my labours.  This is a fully functioning WordPress site and it’s going to be the next part of the experiment.  There were a few tricks to get it up and running and seamlessly integrated but I have to say now it’s done I wish I’d done it from the start.  Just imagine all the benefits of Joomla and WordPress together in a seamless look and feel.

I think this is something all Church websites and Christian websites should strive for.  Get all your stuff in one place.  Forget duplicate sites or different email addresses make your Church website or Christian website have one brand and get it all working together.  Since this is the first post I’ll stop here butI’ll post something soon on how to build the two things together.

Alan