Well I finally done it, after years of debating whether or not to move to another Content Management System I took the plunge and moved to Joomla.

From here on out I will refer to Content Management System as CMS and Virtual Private Server as VPS.

When I first started Wolfmanzbytes.com I did so on a CMS called Coranto. At the time Coranto was a good choice because I’m friends with a guy (Paul) who knows Coranto inside and out and he got wolfmanzbytes.com up and running in no time at all.

At the time I was new to whole CMS scene so Coranto seemed like the ideal choice. It wasn’t until sometime later when I was browsing the web I come across a site that talked about a CMS called Mambo. I spent a fair amount of time checking Mambo out and from what I could see on the web site it looked like it was much more user friendly and more powerful then Coranto was by leaps and bounds.

Sometime later another friend of mine (Spider) was talking about doing a web site and I mentioned to him to check out Mambo however by this time the Mambo project forked and now the forked project was called Joomla. My buddy (Spider) had a VPS and so when he was setting up his web site using Joomla he put a Joomla install for me up on the VPS as well so I could mess around with it and see what I thought of it.

After spending a few hours with the Joomla on the VPS I was hooked, it was then and there that I started thinking about getting my site that was on Coranto switched over to joomla.

For me the biggest hassle on switching to Joomla was going to be how do you get all the content out of the Coranto CMS and into Joomla? If I still had my leet programming skills that I had when I was 18 I would have done up a script of some sort to import the data from one CMS to the other. However since I can’t remember how to program any more do to old age, and lack of interest, I was pretty much stuck using copy and paste and this was quite time consuming.

I have to say after all the screwing around getting Joomla up and running, that I’m really pleased with what I see in terms of both the WolfmanzBytes web site as well as the administrator back end of Joomla. One thing is for sure Joomla is more than capable of handling anything I want to do now, as well as anything I may want to do in the future.

As for the web site redesign, I pretty much wanted to do that for a long time as well. Ever since I put the ads on the site I wasn’t happy with the way site looked, so I had to change all that as well. A lot of the web site in terms of layout / colors is still the same and I wanted to keep that way. I did have to make the right hand Colum wider because I wanted the news feed in it to look decent and also be wide enough for the ads.

One of the tools I purchased for the redesign of the website is a tool called Artisteer and this program is brilliant for letting you design a web site in a graphical way. Artisteer can make templates for Joomla and Wordpress as well as several other types of CMS’s. As good as Artisteer is I did see some short falls with it and I will get into those when I review the program in the future.

Two people I would like to thank here are Paul and Spider. Spider was the guy that let me use his VPS for the last 5 years to keep wolfmanzbytes.com up and running and for that I’m grateful. As for Paul he is the go to guy when you have a web site problem, for instance deleting a critical folder you shouldn’t have lol. Without both of these guys, I would have a hell of a lot less hair and I don’t think wolfmanbytes.com would be where it is today.

Now that WolfmanzBytes is up and running at 100% I can finally get back to doing reviews as well as more Audio / Video stuff for the site.

If anyone out there notices broken links on the site or something not working properly on the web site please be sure to hit the feedback button and let me know so I can fix it.