So after several years of using the Koken CMS system for the cswphotos.com site, I have made the move back to WordPress. To help with this I have chosen to purchase an extensible theme, "ThemeX" as it provides great flexibility and has made the transition quite pain free.

Koken was great, free and hooked into Lightroom, well at least the CMS side was. Unfortunately it was let down by limited themes and unless I dug into php this was a problem. Managing the site though was straight forward as was setting it up initially. I would say it is far simpler than Wordpress as all the components are in one place, no need to download plugins, but this was also its shortfall. WordPress delivers such a flexible platform with many contributors, these reasons made it an easy decision, especially after finding a theme that gave me 80% the look I was after.

I suspect the next step after this would be to a dedicated platform such as square space as they are configured for photographers to show, proof and sell images, but for now the functionality I need is here. 

Out of the box the theme comes with many additional components, some are the intro level versions which can be upgraded. So at the moment I have lost the Lightroom integration, but I have worked around that using Lightroom catalogs to represent the site content.

So with the help of my WordPress guru from RichardTech my site was reconfigured, tested, moved and made live in a less than 24hrs. Quite an achievement.