The New Site Upgrade

2008 December 28

By Matt

As you can see, I’ve completely overhauled the site. And by completely, I mean completely.

Amped was originally operating on a Joomla CMS platform. Now, I like Joomla in some ways. It’s very flexible and modular, and I wouldn’t discourage anyone from using it, but some of its coding choices made it very painful to work with on the front end. It didn’t sit well with me as far as theme development.

I’ve now switched over to WordPress, which is technically blogging software, but I just like it more. The back-end is much more direct, especially considering I don’t have need for much but, well, blogging and posting occasional articles. WP developers are all over the place, so customizing features with plugins is easy; turning it into a full-fledged CMS was easy enough. And finally, theme development for this sucker is a dream. It hasn’t taken much but a text editor and some free time to build a whole custom theme from the ground up.

Now, regarding technical matters – a lot of things had to be manually changed in the theme and database due to the fact that I’m a very sloppy coder, so if something breaks, well, I won’t be surprised.

As far as browsers, I’ve tested Firefox 2 & 3, Google Chrome and the latest Opera releases with no problems. If you’re on a Mac or still using IE (God help you) then you’re reading at your own risk.

If you’re coming here from an old Joomla link, I’ve added redirections to most of the URLs so you should end up at the right place; most of the older Joomla posts have been imported into WP. If there’s something I forgot or something you feel is missing, let me know and I’ll look into it.