WordPress in a subdirectory

Table of contents for WordPress tips

  1. WordPress in a subdirectory
  2. WordPress child themes
  3. In-Series WordPress plugin

WordPress logoI’m finally being smart enough to use my own website as a place to keep notes. I am forever looking up the process of installing WordPress in a subdirectory and yet making it available from the root. Well here’s the page that explains the process: http://codex.wordpress.org/Giving_WordPress_Its_Own_Directory

But to summarize:

Using a pre-existing subdirectory install

If you already have WordPress installed in its own folder (i.e. http://example.com/wordpress) then the steps are as follows:

  1. Go to the General panel.
  2. In the box for Site address (URL): change the address to the root directory’s URL. Example: http://example.com
  3. Click Save Changes. (Do not worry about the error message and do not try to see your blog at this point! You will probably get a message about file not found.)
  4. Copy (NOT MOVE!) the index.php and .htaccess files from the WordPress directory into the root directory of your site (Blog address). The .htaccess file is invisible, so you may have to set your FTP client to show hidden files. If you are not usingpretty permalinks, then you may not have a .htaccess file. If you are running WordPress on a Windows (IIS) server and are using pretty permalinks, you’ll have a web.config rather than a .htaccess file in your WordPress directory. As stated above, copy (don’t move) the index.php file to your root directory, but MOVE (DON’T COPY) the web.config file to your root directory.
  5. Open your root directory’s index.php file in a text editor
  6. Change the following and save the file. Change the line that says:
    require('./wp-blog-header.php');
    to the following, using your directory name for the WordPress core files:
    require('./wordpress/wp-blog-header.php');
  7. Login to your site. It should still be http://example.com/wordpress/wp-admin/
  8. If you have set up Permalinks, go to the Permalinks panel and update your Permalink structure. WordPress will automatically update your .htaccess file if it has the appropriate file permissions. If WordPress can’t write to your .htaccess file, it will display the new rewrite rules to you, which you should manually copy into your .htaccess file (in the same directory as the main index.php file.)

 

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Written by

Jennifer Petkus divides her time between writing Jane Austen-themed mysteries, creating websites for the dead, woodworking, aikido and building model starships. She has few credentials, having failed to graduate from the University of Texas with a journalism degree, but did manage to find employment at the Colorado Springs Sun newspaper as a cop reporter, copy editor and night city editor before the paper died in 1986. She has done little since. Her husband is the night editor at The Denver Post. Her best friend is a cop. She watched Neil Armstrong walk on the Moon live. She is the author of, Good Cop, Dead Cop: A Novel about the AfterNet. She’s writing the sequel, The Background Noise of Souls, and another AfterNet related story, Jane Austen’s Book Tour.

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