I have an active site with a different CMS system on it.

In theory, couldnt I create a DB on my server, then load and create magazine site on dev.mydomain.com and then only have to move the files and update the license since the DB info wont be changing?

Can we create back issues relatively easily?

I am running my current site on PHPCow and I have 1700 articles.  Has anyone out there converted databases so that we dont have to copy ~ paste 1700 times?  Any ideas on how to proceed?

Joomla is growing on me and I am excited about the magazine and ad agency products.

I have a site that is basically a newspaper site but we have many static pages we would want to have.  Can we do that here?  We currently use PHP cow and they have the ability to do this within the management console.