First, I have to give credit to Sayontan Sinha. His “Suffusion” theme is quite possibly the best WordPress theme I’ve ever encountered. It was quick and easy to install, customize, and set up to make the website redesign go off without a hitch. I use his theme here as well. Cumberland Goodwill EMS‘ website is now quite spiffy, and a lot of the credit has to go to Sayotan Sinha for making it easy. The Suffusion theme page can be found here, if you’re using it be sure to be kind and make a nice little donation to Sayontan for his hard work.
The redesign was a snap, what was difficult was trying to find out how the heck to best manage a renaming of the blog website. A little background. To play around with WordPress for Cumberland Goodwill, I mistakenly installed it in a subdirectory named “test.” Now I really didn’t want people visiting /test to see our site, and I already have the main root’s index acting as a redirect to the current subdomain-buried site, so coming up with a workaround was a bit of a challenge. Here are problems I encountered.
Everyone likes to mention a .htaccess file, unfortunately I couldn’t find one. I fought for a good hour unhiding files on both my mac, various ftp clients, and what have you until I said screw it. My original plan was just to move it to the root directory, it became quite clear that I was too chicken to do that without being able to see my .htaccess file. Instead I opted to go with a folder rename. I simply updated the location names under general settings from /test to /40, which was a more acceptable subdomain. After that, in my FTP Client Transmission, I renamed the test folder to 40 to match what I had instructed wordpress to do.
That worked, sort of. It got me back to a functional blog with all my themes, plugins, yadda yadda. Unfortunately, a lot of linked items that pointed to /test still existed. Searching around on the web I found that there is an awesome plugin, search-and-replace, that can completely fix all links after a migration. Heres how it works. The terms you want replaced go in the first text-entry field, followed by the terms you want to replace them with. In my case, I wanted to replace /test/ with /40/, fixing all broken links in the process. I selected all of the dialog boxes, let the plugin do it’s magic, and then I had a completely functioning site once more. I updated the site redirect so that the main page forwards to the blog. I know it’s not best practices, I’d love to have it under root, but finding a good, quality transition guide for WordPress 3.0 that makes no mention of a critical “.htaccess file” is darn hard. I’ll settle for a subdomain that fits our identity anyday… or in the future I’ll just install directly to the website root.
The excellent search-and-replace plugin can be found here.
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