I have updated the converter to remove the debug code.

I tested this with Wordpress 2.7.1 and Joomla 1.0.x.

Please ensure you configure each of the database sections correctly. I have receieved a lot of support requests where people are getting “Table does not exist” errors, these in each case have turned out to be a result of a miss configuration in the converter config file.

I have made a change to the Wordpress to Joomla converter that allows you tochoose not to import comments. This is a small change to the config.php and content.php file. I also need to remove the debugging from the content.php page which has been rolled into this version.

The download link on the downloads page links to the new wp2joomla.zip file

I have always been a great lover of music and to an extent I can appreciate good ar, my talents in these areas however are lacking. I have always thought it to be one of the great injustices of this world, that someone who loves and appreciates music so much, lacks the talent to create music of their own.

This topic in general struck a chord with me whilst I was watching television one day, whilst nursing my self through a flu, there was an interview with an actor and they mentioned the phrase “this is your art” and other phrases along the same lines “suffer for you art” etc. This got me to thinking. What is my art? and why is their art considered an art over the things that I can do, and at the end of the day I concluded 2 things

1. Art is simply a skill
2. I do have an art, and that art is coding…PHP coding

I think the skills of so many coders out there are so heavily underated, some of the creations of so many digital artists. Things like Facebook, but not only that the thousands or parts that make your day to day like more entertaining, make it easier and generally just fit in without you even noticing.

There is something beautiful about a well written PHP application, the way it flows the way everything ties together, and the way user actions have been predicted and accounted for. Even in a nicely configured editor with syntax highlighting, looks like a picture to me, and the intricacy fascinates me. Reading other peoples well written code, will keep me tied to the screen until I manage to decipher every part of it. Anything that can engage you for as long as code can, and can have so much detail and can achieve so much can be nothing more than art.

Coding requires great skill, practice, patience and the ability to think out issues in so many different ways, it isnt something that everyone can do but it is something that some do with such beauty, that even if you only understood 1/10th of what was going on.

To me, my code is my art, and I suffer for it. I lay awake unable to sleep some nights as I try to think through a concept or how to achieve something I need to in an application I am writing, or simply trying to grasp an idea. Coding is something that piques your interest and in a way truly does envelope your life, you often find yourself thinking through a task on the computer and trying to come up with a way to simplify it, you end up spending 3 hours writing code to achieve something you could have done by hand in a mere few seconds and when you have finally finished that application, ground breaking function or class that you dreamed up in the middle of the night, you sit back, you appreciate what you have done, and in the Open Source world, you put it out there and you hope others appreciate it, much in the same manner as an artist puts their work out there.

When I first took my steps into real web development and management, and started what could be called a serious site the Acronym CMS was something fairly new, well on a large scale it was new, but upon hearing this buzz word and looking into it, I immediately saw the massive benefit that this would provide me and my website.

So I entered into the market of websites driven by a CMS, for this I chose e107 and at that stage SEO and in fact search engines in general were something that just happened, however over the years I outgrew e107 and started switching to other systems. For one of my sites lpgconversions.org I made the switch from e107 to Joomla 1.0.13 within 2 months I had gone from barely ranking to the top ranks position for the key words “lpg conversions” and suddenly I realised what I had been missing out on with all my sites, and quickly changed the ones I was able to without to much pan over to Joomla and again my ranks soared and my income began to increase via Google Adsense and my other networks.

Many would have thought that this was the end of the story. However never being one content with the status quot and always wanting to improve on what I have in front of my, I continued to read up about the other Open Source CMS applications out their and their various benefits. Someone mentioned Wordpress as the leader, so I decided to test it out, and willing to take a profit hit I did so on lpgconversions.org, I went to the extent of making the URL’s match in order to keep continuity so that, on the next Google scan everything would appear similar apart from the platform.

A funny thing happened here, my ranking in no less than a week dropped from 1st position to 7th and the only change I had made was the platform serving my content. I was shocked, from all accounts I had read Wordpress should have boosted my ranking, I worked harder at it, placing all of the various SEO plugins, themes and changes advised by the learned fold of the internet in general, but no change that I made would fix my ranking, my profits took a massive plunge, I persisted for 1 month but just could not get things on track, and thus 1 month after the experiment began I rolled back to Joomla! 1.0.13 and again to my astonishment, my ranking shot straight back up to number 1, literally over night.

I have never been able to figure out precisely the cause of this plummet or the exact differences between the Joomla implantation and the Wordpress one, because to all intents and purposes they looked the same to Google.

You will notice however that I still use Wordpress for 2 of my sites, and am looking at adding a 3rd to that list, why? I hear you ask. Well to put simply, certain tools, suit certain trades, and in this case, Wordpress is second to none, for ease of use and true blogging power, done, right the SEO will increase, however for pure out of the box SEO and ranking power the 1.0.x series of Joomla has no equal, even Joomla 1.5 does not offer the same power.

So next time you are in the position to test, and are willing to toy with your rankings for a few days, I advise testing this, and if you manage to get better results than I did, please share them with us!.

Furthermore, in the future I plan to test further CMS options with the same above domain so that we have the same baseline and I plan on sharing them with you. If there are any options out there you would like tested, please let me know (And please point me at a converter so I wont have to build one) so that I can run the benchmarks for you.

I didn’t want to start the site with one of those first “welcome” posts, because well they generally lack merit and offer nothing on the reading front for new and old viewers, however I find it incredibly hard to resist or really start with anything other than a welcome message.

I am still finalising design and much more about the site, and the setup is of course going to take a few days until I am happy.

But I thought I would offer you a an idea of what you are going to find on this site once we are fully alive and kicking.

The hope is that this will become an active outlet for me to provide some insights for new coders and old coders alike. I am not the worlds best PHP programmer but I have yet to be confronted with something I could not put together, even if it was not the right way.
Over the coming weeks months and maybe years I am going to start posting some blog posts about some of the bits of code that I have written across the years, and share much of this code with you for your own use and critique.

I have often written snippets of code to automate tasks and that I use in my day to day usage of the net, many of the things I write are mere hacks and changes to functionality of other code.
In my never ending search for the perfect application for my busiest site http://www.silvertails.net, I have had cause to write many a converter between the various open source software packages available on the net. As a result I have a good collection of code where some has been of value to only me, but through this site I will be releasing these chunks of code, so that you can use them, change them and mold them into something useful for you.

Finally the site is going to be an avenue for me to “Geek Out” and spare more poor fiance the boredom when I begin waxing lyrical about some crazy code idea or internet scheme I have dreamed up during the night.

So with that said, I look forward to getting under way and getting something to you and as such I extend a warm welcome to any who take the time to read and visit this site.