C-FWZZ

My site devoted to C-FWZZ, the Piper Aircraft Corporation PA-23-250-C “Aztec” that I was in care and control of for over 16 years, has just today been officially re-launched and is running on WordPress 3.2.1. Initially created in June of 2005 while I was in Quebec City, Quebec and in of all things, Microsoft FrontPage, it went through a few iterations over the years.

From the FrontPage version, I migrated it to a proper HTML/CSS site using Dreamweaver; then to Joomla!. And from Joomla! it went to Drupal and now it has found it’s home with WordPress. Check out my blog on GoodCheapFastWebSites.com for the lo down and rationale.

In the intervening 5 years or so, I have managed to amass somewhere in the neighbourhood of 1.4 million words on the subject. Mostly in note form and the majority of which were created in the NoteTaker™ application on G4 iBook. Initially I had envisioned a traditional approach, you know, a book format. But the more I wrote, the more I realized that my style was not that. As evidenced here, it is more of a “notes” style as opposed to a narrative.  Then to was the matter of how to distribute the result. Various ideas came to mind. A complete “work” self-published via Lulu.com or the like, on a dedicated web site in “book” format, or some combination. It was my recent “conversion” to WordPress from Joomla! that sealed the deal. Once I saw what WordPress 3.0 could do and how easy it was to do it, the decision was made. Switch over the existing LyleChamney.com from Joomla! to WordPress 3.0 and do it in a blog format based upon dates.

As dates are how I functioned when creating my notes, this seemed to be the ideal way to make it available here. It also will allow me the flexibility to create the posts in a non-liner manner. They can be created for any date and as long as I set them to the correct category, they will be in chronological order.

So away I go. This is the first post and it will be in the Introduction category. Bookmark or subscribe to keep up with the latest skivvy.

LyleChamney.com is now 100% WordPress 3.0. The conversion was a purely manual effort as I couldn’t use the Joomla To WordPress Migrator plugins because the databases were not on the same server. I have successfully used this plugin on local installations and it works like a charm. In reality though, in this case, it wouldn’t have done a lot of good anyway for the following reasons:

• I ended up reworking a lot of the content as it was high time to do so
• most of the conversion had to do with “add-ons”
• had to do comments manually anyway
• I needed the WordPress practice

This is the third site I have put up using WordPress 3.0 and I have to admit that I am a bona fide convert from Joomla! There are way too many things to list in this post that makes me feel this way and I shall do so in a subsequent one.

There remain many things for me to learn about WordPress as I have only had a cursory look in the past. My tool of choice for the last 2.5 years has been Joomla! with the odd dabbling in Drupal (which I also like quite a lot). However, from now on, WordPress has taken over that top spot on my web site building tool belt.

One thing else that I will briefly touch on here, and will expand on in detail later, is that this site is using a theme that I generated with an alpha release of Artisteer. This is a testing version of their WordPress 3.0 support and I have to say that I am very impressed. More on this in a future post.

LyleChamney.com has now been converted from my web and graphics design site to a personal site that will showcase some of my manual and digital artwork, among other things.

The web and graphics design, now including custom templates and themes for Joomla!, WordPress, Drupal, HTML and DotNetNuke using Artisteer, along with tips and getting started guides for Joomla!, are now available at www.2ninerniner2.com.

First go-around with the K2 extension from Joomlaworks has been successful. This is a very powerful and complex addition to the Joomla! developer’s arsenal and I have here only touched the surface of it’s remarkable capabilities. As I get more familiar with it, I will be extending the functionality of it on this site and reporting about what I have done in my Blog.

Additionally, the Joomla! template that is in use on this site was created with Artisteer and slightly modified from it’s native build. The tweaks that were made on it will be documented both here and on www.2ninerniner2.com shortly. As well, a few adjustments were made to the standard K2 stylesheet; these will be covered too.

The first iteration of LyleChamney.com  was created using Dreamweaver. I went through many versions but ended up never really getting it complete. Then Joomla! came along and the next version was built with that. Within the Joomla! version, I virtually rebuilt the content using the K2 extension from Joomlaworks.gr. And that is what it has been until now. What you see here is WordPress 3.0 and I have a hunch that it will be on this fine platform for quite some time.