Is it hard to move a blog around within a website?

October 25, 2010 12:15 PM

I'd like to be walked through the (no doubt very easy) process of moving a Wordpress blog to a different part of my website.

The situation: Right now I have a webcomic that displays on a static, Dreamweaver-built page at foo.com, and a Wordpress blog about the comic at foo.com/blog.

I've decided that the static page looks like shit and Dreamweaver is for the birds, so I want to start using ComicPress to display the strip (I sue it for another strip of mine, and like it very much). To do this, I'd like to move the blog currently sitting at foo.com/blog over so that it resides up-front at foo.com (and once it's moved, I'll also want to install the ComicPress plugin, but I think I can do that on my own).

Is this difficult? What do I need to do? I assume it's actually pretty elementary. Right? Please?

posted by COBRA! to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

You should be able to move all the files fron /blog up into the main directory and just change one little Wordpress setting to the new location. In the Options menu, change Wordpress address and blog address.

Of course, none of this plans for what happens to old links to the blog. If you wanted to preserve those, you've have to do a little mucking around in .htaccess files as far as I know.
posted by advicepig at 12:31 PM on October 25, 2010

It's very simple. On your dashboard, you go to the Settings screen and change where you want the blog to point, it's the fourth field down ("Site Address"). See more here.
posted by stennieville at 12:32 PM on October 25, 2010

That's all there is to it? Damn, that IS elementary. Thanks, guys.

(old links to the blog aren't much of a worry, because they're almost universally "hey! A new strip is up!")
posted by COBRA! at 12:47 PM on October 25, 2010

Yeah, do that second one. I was thinking more php and less wordpress. I had no idea there was no step 2.
posted by advicepig at 1:42 PM on October 25, 2010

I created a custom WordPress theme for my friend Brett Jackson's strip Massive Sqwertz, I'd be happy to share code from that back to you if ComicPress ends up not working out for you.
posted by artlung at 3:28 PM on October 25, 2010

Thanks for the offer! I'll probably stick with CP since I know the ins and outs, but you never know.
posted by COBRA! at 7:56 AM on October 26, 2010

For posterity, in case anyone else looks to this for advice: It wound up being slightly more complicated, but not too bad. After changing the settings on the WordPress dashboard, I also had to fire up my FTP software, go out to the server, and move all of WordPress's files (all the blah.php files, plus the /wp-content -type folders) up a level, from foo.com/blog to the root foo.com.

There were some secondary complications (turning an existing WordPress blog into ComicPress is a CHORE if you already have a post category called "comics"), but they're probably not universal things that others are likely to run into.
posted by COBRA! at 1:29 PM on October 26, 2010