Switching website platforms

Calliegirl

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Right now I have a Joomla website, but plan to switch it over to Wordpress.

I want the old site to stay up while I setup and add content to the new one.

I hope this part isn't too confusing, but can I just rename the folder the WP theme is in, to the name of the folder where the Joomla site is located when I'm ready for it to go live? Of course I'll rename the Joomla folder as well.

If I can do that, obviously the links to the old website will no longer be valid, which sucks since they have a decent page ranking. Can I just set those to redirect to the new website?
 
This is just speculation, but you might be able to find migration scripts to copy all your Joomla content to Wordpress. Also, you might be able to find redirect scripts so that links for your articles will continue to work. At least these kinds of scripts are fairly common in the web forum world, so hopefully it's the same with blogs. If it is, then you don't need to rename the folders.
 
I wish it could be, but it can't be copied over, it's in completely different formats. The old one has articles, the new one is listings. I won't need the articles from the old site, all the information will be in listing form on the new site. I'd like to redirect those links to the new site since they show up on Google and a few links from other sites.

Here's the original site http://www.oneveganworld.com/. As you can see, it's very outdated (it's the same design from about 5 years ago) and limited for use as a directory. The new one is going to be an actual directory site, similar to yelp. I'm going to have to put everything in by hand.

So, would renaming the folders work?
 
I don't think you can just rename the folders because the links will be different with different software. In Joomla you have links that end with e.g. "/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=70&Itemid=74" whereas with Wordpress it seems they will end with e.g. "/?p=23" or "/2013/01/first-competition-announcement-for-2013-bislett-games-oslo-13th-june/".

However, it's possible to write a little script that will re-direct from your old pages to your new pages. I see that you're on an Apache server, so you could probably use a .htaccess file to do this. (Well, assuming Apache is configured or can be configured to support mod_rewrite.) The syntax of these files can be a little challenging though .... I would suggest to develop the Wordpress site in a different folder at first, and create a list of all the old links and which new link should be used instead for each of them. If at all possible, create the new pages so that the id number in the old page URL ("/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=70&Itemid=74") is the same as the number ("/?p=70") in the new page URL ..... Then you can use the redirect idea someone posted here:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/337519/redirect-joomla-urls-to-wordpress

It seems from a purely technical point of view, you can migrate your Joomla articles to Wordpress using e.g. one of the plugins listed here. But if I understand correctly, you want to change the layout format? Since it's not that many pages, I suppose that's not impossible.

If the above is all Greek to you, I may be able to help on a more practical level, but then you'd have to trust me with your server login credentials :)

Also, I saw a paid Wordpress plugin somewhere that would create redirects and migrate your content at the same time, but not sure if that is suitable to your requirements ....
 
I think I understand more or less what you're saying.

The redirect part seems easy, I can do them from my cpanel. I just put in the old page and the new page. At least it seems easy, I may just not be understanding how it works. There's really just two important articles, that have most of the links to them, that I need redirected.

Once the website (or would that be domain?) is pointed (sorry for the lack of correct technical terms) at the folder with wordpress instead of joomla, will I still be able to redirect the links that originally went to the joomla site?

If it would help to look at it, I can give you my login credentials.
 
I think I understand more or less what you're saying.

The redirect part seems easy, I can do them from my cpanel. I just put in the old page and the new page. At least it seems easy, I may just not be understanding how it works. There's really just two important articles, that have most of the links to them, that I need redirected.

Once the website (or would that be domain?) is pointed (sorry for the lack of correct technical terms) at the folder with wordpress instead of joomla, will I still be able to redirect the links that originally went to the joomla site?

If it would help to look at it, I can give you my login credentials.
Ah, sounds like you have a good strategy there. I've never used cpanel myself (though we had something similar on VB), but I've heard it can do a lot of the things geeks do on the command-line. Anyway, give it a go, and presumably you can have both Joomla and Wordpress installed at the same time while you develop the new site in Wordpress.

And yes, once the domain root is pointed to the Wordpress folder, instead of pointing to the Joomla folder, then I don't see any reason why redirecting wouldn't work. Just make sure you have a list of the old links and which new page they should point to!