Joomla out, WordPress in–major site revamp this weekend!

Last weekend, I made brief mention of some “site maintainance” that was going to happen over the weekend–namely, me upgrading this website’s current Joomla version (1.5) to the more current 2.5. Unfortunately, I discovered that the component I use for blogging won’t work wth 2.5, and doesn’t currently have a 2.5 upgrade. So, I could either wait for them to eventually produce one, or I could do what I was strongly considering anyway, which is to scrap Joomla entirely and rebuild this site as a WordPress site. As the title of this entry reveals, I decided to go ahead with option two.

So this week I’ve been building a test version of the site in a super-seekrit subdomain, mainly so I can make some necessary design choices, see how things look, fix issues with links and image displays and such. When that’s done, which should be soon, I’ll export all those posts and pages, scrap this site, install wordpress, and import the lot again. I expect to be doing this sometime over Memorial Day weekend, so if you drop by and things are looking funky, or altogether absent, that’s why. I’m doing as much prep work as possible in advance, so hopefully this downtime will be minimal.

Though all the URLs to all the things will be changing, I’ll be setting up redirects so that anyone coming to the site from someplace else using old links will get directed to the correct content in its new location. The RSS feed for the site will also be changing (to https://www.garywolson.com/feed/), though I think WordPress is smart enough to recognize the old feed address and deliver accordingly. (Clicking it now will only send you to an error page. I knew you were wondering.) Hopefully this won’t result in you who follow this blog directly via RSS being flooded by entries. I’ll be temporarily disabling the syndications to Facebook (NetworkedBlogs), LiveJournal, Dreamwidth, Amazon, and GoodReads, just in case.

See you on the other side!

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Gary W. Olson is the author of the dark fantasy novel Brutal Light and several previously published and forthcoming short stories. He can be found via his website, his blog A Taste of Strange, as @gwox on Twitter, and in many other far-flung places on the Internet.

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