Moving WordPress, Trying Joomla, Liking Drupal

Submitted by ejpadero on Mon, 2009/10/19 - 3:21am

The Move

I had been meaning to move my blog from my domain root to a subdirectory for some time now. I made a few of botched attempts last year, then time-pressed with other things, I gave up. Until two days ago. A little inspiration went a long way. A little more work was required this time, because last year's failed migration of WordPress left some complications in the initial objective.

When I first tried to move my WP blog last year, I had the brilliant idea of putting it in a domain sub-folder named "2008". Being the WP newbie that I was, I did not know that the MySQL database in WP already had such a directory in use for my 2008 archives. So when I created the said folder and then installed WP in it, WP got confused with the two installations, thinking they were the same database. In short, I kinda mixed/messed up WP and almost broke it. I was lucky that the database was still usable.

My domain CPanel > Fantastico > WordPress section then thought that I had 3 instances of WP: in the root, in /2008, and in /vol2. Attempts to rectify the issue merely wrecked the database completely and I had to ask the nice people at my web host to restore full backups of my domain a couple of times. So I just left it at that - the root and /2008 in a weird merge, but /vol2 working fine.

This past Saturday, I was able to spend some time to continue with the WP migration (and of course the separation & cleanup of the mess from last year's failures). I don't know if I just missed things last year, or if updating to the latest WP version helped, but I was finally able to run all the way home with it. EJPdC: Vol 1 and Vol 2 are now where I want them to be.

Muchos gracias to "Moving WordPress" on the WordPress Codex and to "How to Transfer a WordPress Blog to a Different Directory" on eHow.

Joomla vs. Drupal

With EJPdC: Vol 1 out of the root and safely in a subdir (working fine, but needing a few tweaks with the media/images locations), my domain root was now empty and ready for the portal type of menu for all things EJ Padero that I had in mind. I tried and thought about yet another WP installation, but thought of using CMS instead. The very nifty CPanel > Fantastico domain wizard showed me two choices that stood out because I came across them at work before - Joomla and Drupal.

I tried/installed Joomla in my domain root first. I was overwhelmed by its complexity and array of options. It seemed too much to use for my personal portal. I removed it and tried Drupal next.

Maybe Joomla was too different from WordPress, which I have gotten used to. Drupal feels more similar to WP. Maybe that's why I feel more able to use Drupal than Joomla. I'm liking Drupal so far. Here goes nothing.