After a lot of tossing and turning and I mean literally (check out the time – I can’t sleep) I convinced myself that the site would be better off using Serendipity as its CMS system instead of Joomla. Why?  Well after setting up the Shimoda House weblog and using Serendipty I was really impressed with how easy it was to setup.  Then add in a few issues with Joomla not working for me!

To try and resolve the problems with Joomla I tried the RC2 of version 1.5, and while my site sorta came back online, all the plugins had to be redone etc, then to add insult to injury the one module I really used ‘Myblog’ was now a commercial component.  So do I spend money on having a site that will need more work etc to just do what I’ve discovered Serendipity can do out of the box?  Plus I can email Serendipity from my mobile with picture support, dead easy, it looks like it can link into Coppermine for images, and well its just simple to use!  So bye bye Joomla, hello Serendipty.

I still think Joomla is a great product and it has a great many supporters, but it was just way to complex for what I really wanted to do and I suspect the upgrade to 1.5 is going to cause them a great deal of problems as its easy.  Right now that I’ve upgraded the site, written the first message, I can goto sleep!