Archive for the 'Joomla' Category

Successfully imported Wordpress 2.7 into Joomla 1.5

Published
by
Chalupa
on July 30, 2009
in Advice, Joomla, Nerdy/Geeky and Wordpress
. 0 Comments

In my last post, I exported mojoBlog to Wordpress, I successfully got mojoBlog converted into Wordpress and then exported Wordpress into an XML file.  Following the instructions from http://www.daydreymer.com/index.php/Technical/Tools/wordpress-export-to-joomla/All-Pages.html, I was then able to take that XML file and convert it into an SQL file to import into my Joomla 1.5 database.

Here are a few hiccups along the way that might help you out if you’re trying this.

  • Make sure you setup your Section/Category where you want all your blog posts to reside in Joomla.  The SQL generator has a place where you can enter the Section/Category IDs.  I did not do this the first time and all of a sudden I had 385 orphaned articles in Joomla.
  • When importing my SQL file into my database through PHPMYADMIN, uploading the file didn’t work, but if I copied/pasted the file into the textbox that seemed to work just fine.
  • Lastly, I was receiving a really weird error when trying to import in my database.  Turns out there was some weird javascript inside a particular blog post that was screwing everything up.  I was able to just edit the SQL file and remove the javascript code.

I’m not sure if I could be much help to your particular situation, but feel free to leave a comment if you’re having some problems and I can try.  I don’t know how many people are using mojoBlog, but the support seems to have dried up and it’s been over a year since version 0.17 was supposed to be released.  If I were you, I’d move your mojoBlog to Wordpress, if not Joomla.  Getting mojoBlog migrated to something else will allow me to update my Joomla 1.012 site to Joomla 1.5.  If you haven’t seen the new version, you’re in for a surprise.  Things are much, much better than they were before.

I’m continuing to post to my mojoBlog blog and need to figure out a few more things before I can migrate everything.  I still working on figuring out how to import my comments.  Supposedly !JoomlaComment can do that.  That’s my next project.

Think I’m sticking with Joomla

Published
by
Chalupa
on July 30, 2009
in Joomla, Nerdy/Geeky and Wordpress
. 0 Comments

For the past two days I’ve been trying to work out exactly how I could move my Joomla site over to Wordpress.  It was going to be complicated.  Even after I figured out how to export my mojoBlog content, move all of my Joomla content into WP categories, acquire a menu system to mimic the old site, and import the users….I was still left with the SEF stuff.

This may not seem like too big of a deal, but I’ve spent the past two years trying to make a web site people want to come to and have acquired a Google Rating of 4.  I’m pretty proud of that and am not looking forward to losing that.  I know there are plugins that could help, but the truth is I know I wouldn’t be able to figure out all the redirects.  I have over 400 content items without even considering the blog, not to mention all of the internal links withing those content items.

After talking it over with Soulman, he sold me on upgrading to Joomla 1.5.  Everything on that site works wonderfully except for the blog.  He helped me to consider a few blogging options, both free and not-free, and I’ve been working out the details.  I should be able to port all of my mojoBlog items into Joomla core content and I think I’ve found a way to export all the comments.  I think I can tie the comments to the posts, but I haven’t tested it yet.  Other than a couple of tiny other hurdles that should be behind me soon, there isn’t too much more to figure out.  Looks like I’m going to stick with Joomla on this one guys.

Edit: Turns out every tool, I have found, that used to be able to import Wordpress content into Joomla doesn’t exist or doesn’t work anymore.  If you have any leads on something that will accomplish this, I’d love to hear it.

Exporting mojoblog

Published
by
Chalupa
on July 29, 2009
in Joomla and Wordpress
. 0 Comments

So this is turning out to be more and more complicated.  I knew mojoBlog is a stripped down version of Wordpress, but didn’t realize how stripped down.  It has no export function.

I think what I’ll have to do is export the tables, move the files, and then do a standard Wordpress upgrade.  This doesn’t sound too bad except the tables are bigger than 2MB so I can’t do the standard upload using phpmyadmin.  They cap file sizes.  I could try a few tables at a time, but I think most of it is all in one table which is over 2MB by itself.  I’ll figure it out.  Just trying to be careful and test things before I start messing around with actual data.

Joomla to Wordpress

Published
by
Chalupa
on July 29, 2009
in Joomla, Nerdy/Geeky and Wordpress
. 2 Comments

I’ve had a Joomla site running for a little over 2 years now.  What started off as just a content-based site gradually turned into a content site with a blog which then morphed into a heavily updated blog with some content.  If you’ve used Joomla, you know it’s hard to get decent blog tools without paying any money.  Being a fan of Wordpress, I settled on mojoBlog shortly before the developer stopped having time to work on it.  It’s a great, little stripped-down version of Wordpress, but it’s also full of bugs and just doesn’t quite do what I want.

Lately I’ve been kicking around the idea of exporting everything to Wordpress.  I can’t upgrade to Joomla 1.5 because mojoBlog won’t work.  If I did upgrade to 1.5 I would have to pay some money to get the blog setup and running again.  Last night I found an importer/exporter that will take Joomla content items and bring them into Wordpress 2.7.  I know that’s not the most recent version, but it’s easy to upgrade from there.  The hardest part was finding an old installation file.

From there, I just need to figure out how to tweak the template so things display how I want, import users, and figure a way to keep my permalinks.  I’ve found a few plugins that I think will be very helpful both in menu style, user roles, and multiple permalink formats.  As I’m testing these out and finding things I want to use, I’ll report back with what I’ve found and what works.

Joomla + MojoBlog + Google Search

Published
by
Chalupa
on March 22, 2009
in Blogging, Joomla and Nerdy/Geeky
. 4 Comments

I have a Joomla 1.0 site and use mojoBlog.  It’s been working out pretty well with the exception of SEF URLs and searching.  I know this is because mojoBlog is a component and isn’t well developed yet.  The SEF issue isn’t that big of a deal because Google still crawls the pages and people can find what I post.  The searching has been a little weird.

I really like the included Joomla search module.  It’s works great but I just realized it doesn’t return results for any of my blog posts.  I had tried setting up Google search before, but it didn’t work too well.  I then tried to set it up again today and was still having problems with it finding my blog posts.  The weird thing is that if I do a normal Google search, go to the advanced options and search just my site, I can find blog posts.

I took the searchbox code Google provided and popped it into a module and created a static page for the search results.  I also popped the provided search results code onto the static page.  When I do a search with the module it goes to the static page, but doesn’t show any results, it just shows an empty search bar.  Then when I type my search into the search bar on the static page, no results for blog posts.

Am I doing something wrong here?  Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Edit: Turns out sh404SEF was trying to re-write the URL for the landing page.  After I told it not to, everything worked fine.

Joomla embedded video

Published
by
Chalupa
on January 15, 2008
in Advice and Joomla
. 5 Comments

I recently started embedding some video on my Joomla site.  I thought everything was working fine until I realized it was requiring you to be logged in to view that content.  This seemed really weird so the first thing I checked were the permission levels on the two content items and everything was set to “public,” which is the default setting.

I had used the embed code from YouTube so my next plan of action was to try a plugin I already had installed and was using for some audio - AllVideos.  It took me a couple minutes to figure out what exactly to snag as the YouTube code and get it setup, but that didn’t work either.  I then decided to stream a local video with AllVideos.  This worked, but I still couldn’t figure out why.

I posted on the Joomla forums, talked to a couple geek-friends and pondered on it for most of a day.  Do you know what finally fixed it?  Completely starting over.  I just deleted the two offending content items, re-created them and everything worked fine.  Wish I had thought of that right away.

Joomap and Google Webmaster Tools

Published
by
Chalupa
on October 7, 2007
in Advice, Google and Joomla
. 0 Comments

If you’re looking to submit a sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools and you’re also using the Joomap component for Joomla, you might have some problems with your sitemap being valid. After a couple days of searching and scratching my head I finally figured out the problem by reading a couple other threads on the Joomla forums.

Your URLs in your sitemap must match the URL of the site you’ve setup in Google WT. I originally used “http://www.lebowskipodcast.com” but my sitemap had “http://lebowskipodcast.com” as the start of all the URLs. To fix this I just added “another site” using my URL minus the “www.” I then resubmitted my sitemap and now everything works.

Joomla and Google

Published
by
Chalupa
on October 5, 2007
in Advice, Google, Joomla and Nerdy/Geeky
. 0 Comments

If you have a Joomla site out there and you want to start using some Google tools like Analytics or Adsense or the Webmaster Tools check out the Extensions area at Joomla.org before you start trying to do things the hard way.  I found that lesson out the hard way.  There’s some free components and modules that’ll let you easily change your URLs so they’re SEF (Search Engine Friendly), add Google Analytics, create a sitemap, etc.

Feedburner project

Published
by
Chalupa
on August 9, 2007
in Joomla, Nerdy/Geeky and Podcasting
. 0 Comments

With my pet project seemingly taking off so well, I’ve been looking for ways to enhance the website, advertise more, etc.  One idea I had was to have a counter of some sort showing the total number of downloads for each episode.  Feedburner already has something setup where you can show the number of subscribers as of yesterday.  I went ahead and put that on the “home page”, but would still like to have some counters for downloads.

The Awareness API, or AwAPI, is something you can activate within your Feedburner control panel under the Publicize tab.  This allows 3rd party applications to access your data.  If that doesn’t make any sense another way to put it is that you can create or use a counter that shows the total number of downloads.  Essentially it allows me to pull out any of the data it collects for the RSS feed or any of the episodes.  This includes downloads, hits, visits and subscribers by date and item.

If you want to use this API it isn’t just all cake and ice cream.  You need to know what you’re doing.  The three main calls for this API are GetFeedData, GetItemData and GetResyndicationData.  I want to use GetItemData to find out how many times each item, or episode, has been downloaded.  I could even get total downloads with this.  When you use one of these API calls it returns data in XML format.  You then have to translate or parse that data to use it in whatever way you want.

You can usually make API calls with several different languages.  PHP is what I’m going to use because it’s what I’m more familiar with and I think it’s easier.  Now even though I was a “programmer” in college, that doesn’t mean I’m a Bill Gates or anything.  I wasn’t exactly top of my class, but I think I have a pretty good understanding of theory and I’m able to figure almost anything out as long as i have some documentation, examples and a buddy or two to ask a couple questions.

Yesterday I spent several hours messing around with things.  Essentially I need to create some PHP code to make the API call, translate the data into something usable and then output my data.  For starters I installed the runPHP plugin on my Joomla! site.  Without that plugin, it doesn’t know how to translate the PHP code and thinks it’s a combination of plain text and HTML.  I then found an example somebody else made and tried to figure it out.  The first snag I ran into was I needed to download his feedburner class and include it in the PHP code I was testing.  After playing around with it for a while I eventually realized the feedburner class was returning empty variables to me.  Which is why I couldn’t get the example to output any numbers.

My next step was to try and get some help on the Feedburner forums.  People are pretty helpful in here, but they’re definitely not going to hold your hand with the APIs.  I asked a few specific questions in a stats thread and got some generic answers.  I then made a new post in the developer’s thread after my three hours of fun.  Right now I need to either figure out why the example I downloaded isn’t working, find a new class that parses the data returned, or find a good XML parser in PHP and tweak it for the data I’m using.

At the moment I’m in no shape to just sit down and create something.  It’s been so long since I’ve been coding somewhat regularly (about 4 years) and I’ve never done anything similar to this before.  I’ll need to do some more research and a lot of testing.  If I really put the time and effort into this I could possibly even submit what I create to Feedburner for others to use or just post it on my own web space.  If I end up sharing it to the world I’ll have to make sure I do some hefty testing and debugging.  I don’t know how far I’ll go with this, but it sure was fun to get back into that type of thinking again.  It’s like riding a bike I guess.

If anybody has any tips or ideas I’d love to hear them.  This month is pretty nuts with work and then I’m on vacation for the first part of September.  I’m also pretty busy with podcasting so this is a when-I-get-around-to-it kind of project.

AllVideos problem fixed

Published
by
Chalupa
on June 29, 2007
in Joomla, Nerdy/Geeky, Podcasting, Technology and Webcams
. 0 Comments

Turns out I needed to be saving the file at 44,100Hz for a sampling rate and I had saved it at 32,000Hz.  Everything seems kosher now.  Thanks for the offer to help Justin.  I really appreciate it.

As a side note, I would suggest checking your file settings before recording audio files to make sure they comply with any other software you might be using.  Hopefully that’ll alleviate some headaches for you.