Well, here we go! Another website reorganisation - these re-jigs seem to happen every couple of years. This time, I've taken the plunge and decided to switch from Azrul's MyBlog (and its counterpart commenting system jomComment) to corePHP's
Wordpress Integration for Joomla! 1.5.
This will no doubt be an ongoing overhaul, but first impressions are pretty favourable. CorePHP have developed a set of Joomla! components and modules that integrate the very popular blogging software Wordpress into Joomla! 1.5. Installation of the principal component was straightforward, as was the import of my existing blog entries from MyBlog. The system seems pretty neat: there are some sidebar modules that can be set to hold the various Wordpress widgets. I suppose there are some downsides to relying on developers keeping up with the latest Wordpress releases, but the version installed seemed not to be particularly old (though not the latest).
Documentation appears to be a little light - sufficient for installation to be easy, but not so helpful on aspects of installing the Wordpress plugins that have been modified/developed for the integrated Wordpress. However, corePHP's website has an active support forum, and it seems that support is good - which is as it should be given this is a paid subscription.
So, why did I switch from MyBlog? Mostly because I found the MyBlog interface (both front- and back-end) rather clunky, and the JomComment component seems to build up a very large file cache. And I mean
very large - if not manually cleared, the backup component I use cannot work, and I run out of server disk space. And, of course, my experiences with a standalone Wordpress installation (
Wonderful Life) had exposed me to the inner workings of running a Wordpress blog.