The result of my research was that Wordpress is just, for my purposes, a better CMS. It's more user friendly, more consistently coded (not as much legacy stuff to force an old version on you), and more SEO friendly out of the box.

This is a summary of my learning process as I tried to figure out how to make Joomla Search Engine Friendly.

The least I want is:

- proper titles (title of article or category - followed by general title)

- url's that stay the same even if I change something

I would prefer url's that include keywords, but I think I may have to skip that option for the project I'm working on.

Have you ever installed a Joomla extension and got nothing but a white screen?

Most likely you hit the memory limit on your server. Memory limits help to keep scripts from running out of control or using up all of your free memory. On the other hand, sometimes you are adding a fancy extension to your site, that simply requires slightly more memory then the default 8mb that Apache gives you. Let’s show you how to fix that.

Add a New Super Administrator User

If changing the password won't work, or you aren't sure which user is a member of the Super Administrator group, you can use this method to create a new user.

1. Navigate to phpMyAdmin and select the database for the Joomla! site in the left-hand drop-down list box. This will show the database tables on the left side of the screen.
2. Press the "SQL" button in the toolbar to run an SQL query on the selected database. This will display a field called "Run SQL query/queries on database <your database>".
3. Delete any text in this field and copy and paste the following query below and press the Go button to execute the query and add the new Administrator user to the table.
4. Use the SQL query below to add another administrator account.

SQL code for use with Joomla 2.x | 3.x

INSERT INTO `jos31_users`
   (`name`, `username`, `password`, `params`)
VALUES ('Administrator2', 'admin2',
    'd2064d358136996bd22421584a7cb33e:trd7TvKHx6dMeoMmBVxYmg0vuXEA4199', '');
INSERT INTO `jos31_user_usergroup_map` (`user_id`,`group_id`)
VALUES (LAST_INSERT_ID(),'8');

At this point, you should be able to log into the back end of Joomla! with the username of "admin2" and password of "secret". After logging in, go to the User Manager and change the password to a new secure value and add a valid e-mail address to the account. If there is a chance you have been "hacked", be sure to check that all users are legitimate, especially any members of the Super Administrator group.

Joomla! website developers usually have a few good tricks up their sleeves. Although magicians usually don't want to reveal their slight-of-hand goodies, Joomla! people are much more generous. All you usually have to do is ask. So what's one of my favourite Joomla! tricks? I'm glad you asked.

One of my favourite Joomla! tricks is the loadposition command . This gives you the ability to load a module inside an article. Just think of all the neat things that you can do with this. Using this technique your articles can have all kinds of dynamic content inside them. You can insert a weather module, rotating images, or a Twitter feed inside an article, whatever you can do in a module you can put in your article.

So, how do you move your Joomla site from one host to another, or from one location to another... easily?
We've found the best success once again, using the free tool www.akeebabackup.com

There is full documentation on the process here,  as well as video tutorials here.
However, we're going to provide you a 'quick and dirty' below which should work for most people.