Help!
I created this blog a while ago. I installed wordpress in a directory called “blog” and left all the other content I’d created before I started blogging in other directories with the homepage sitting on the root. I used the wordpress style sheet across all pages. This was a bad move. I now want to use Worpress to handle all the content management on the site, so I can use the power of Themes and all the goodness that WP offers that is denied to me at the moment. My problem is this. How do I have an instance of WordPress in my root directory (so all content has a URL www.dancingmango.com/???? rather than sitting in www.dancingmango.com/blog/????)
I don’t want to loose any existing blog URLs or break any links in the blog. Does this appeal for help make sense? Can you help?
Here is what I suggest. This is how my site works.
Reconfigure WP to start at / instead of at /blog/. You can leave it installed where it is now (in /blog/), this is just a setting change. It is under “options”, called “blog address”. This will change your post like this one, from
http://www.dancingmango.com/blog/2007/03/15/help/
to
http://www.dancingmango.com/2007/03/15/help/
Set up a mod_redirect rule to redirect anything under /blog/ up to /. This will keep all existing links out there in the wild, working seamlessly. One caveat – you need to do this in a way that lets the WP admin still work – so you need to redirect /blog/foo but not /blog/wp-admin/foo
Now you will be able to add any other content pages you want via WP, under /whatever-url-you-want. Such pages that are served by WP, will coexist peacefully with other content that is sitting there as files/directories.
Thanks!
Isn’t the internet swell?
I faced the same problem initially. My blog was located at /blog/… I later moved to /…
This caused most links in my blog to break. To fix this issue, I just wrote a shell script to replace all instances of /blog/… to /… in my wordpress MySQL dump.
The workaround mention in a comment above, that uses mod_rewrite is a better alternative.