McDonough WordPress development

We’re pleased to announce our successful redevelopment of the web home of Commonwealth Church Finance, a 30-year-old organization that has helped “over 600 churches and non-profit organizations obtain over half a billion dollars to finance construction.” Converting the site from Joomla! to WordPress proved to be a great move for CCF.

The site had used Joomla! 1.0 for some time, and needed an upgrade. But upgrading to Joomla! 1.5 is more of a migration than an upgrade — it’s simply not a developer-friendly process. As long as we had to migrate anyway, why not switch from Joomla! to WordPress, which is easier to use and has an open-source community that dwarfs Joomla!’s? Plus, upgrading the current site to future versions of WordPress will be a snap, especially compared to that daunting Jooma! 1.0-1.5 conversion. We’re still shuddering.

Luckily, CCF agreed to our conclusion. We retained the site’s look and feel, but custom-designed a more appealing header. Converting several static elements into dynamic elements (images into galleries, static pages into blog posts) makes the site easier to update and more flexible.

The site now uses Javascript APIs instead of its former piles of stray scripts scattered everywhere. Cleaning up code assures a faster and more web-standardized site.

We also enabled a Lightbox-esque solution for the site’s hosted video, using JW Player:

Changing this Joomla! site into a WordPress site was certainly worth it, as CCF now has greater control over its site and access to a much, much richer support community.