The old site had been around since August 2002 and whilst it has proven to be very useful in spreading news and information for Wado Academy members and the general karate public, the software itself was slowly becoming dated and showing its age.

I had some time over the Christmas period so I took the opportunity to replace the old PHP-Nuke site with a new system based on Joomla.

I also made the decision to start a fresh and not bring across the old content most of which were reminders about forthcoming events which are now no longer relevant. Other articles I might manually bring across.

Your feedback will be most welcome, good or bad. However, bear in mind that 99% of the time and costs are borne by me, so be gentle.

For those interested in the technical side, I chose Joomla as it is a much more modern CMS (Content Management System) that is being well supported by developers to maintain the CMS itself and also for creating 3rd party add-ons which enhance Joomla even further. I had previously used Mambo but Joomla is just an offshoot of that and time will tell how the two will progress. I had looked an EZpublish and Drupal but for my current needs Joomla is much more suited to this task.

Administration is pretty straight forward but the management of users and their ability to add content needs further thinking about. This is why I will start off fully managing it and then bring in the ability for bonafide members to register and then add their own news and artcles.

The way the CMS uses a section and child categories approach makes it easy to enter content once and then be able to present it in multiple ways, whether it is  a rolling blog, a list or a grouped breakdown of categories. The search engine friendly plugins make the URLs more applicable to the content and hence to the likes of Google , Yahoo and MSN for example.

PHP Nuke was just getting old and probably more susceptible to bugs and hacks. The look and feel was really looking like the 90s.