"Interesting" Wordpress indexing/file structure - how did this happen?

September 9, 2016 10:39 AM

I messed up a Wordpress install. Cleaned and reinstalled. It works now but the file structure is not "normal". I don't need troubleshooting per se, I just want to know WTF happened.

I have my own domain. Not linking it here, but if you want to see the proof or something, I can memail.

Anyway, for a while I had a static home page -- url/index.html until I decided it was time to install WP. Well. I failed to clean out home/public before I did the install. Via command line. Cue collision of index.html with index.php.

I used FileZilla to clear out everything from home/public. Dropped the table via phpmyadmin. Reinstalled. Configured WP the way I liked, with a static home page & blog pages linked separately. I did all this about 2 months ago.

It seemed to be okay ... and then I noticed ... while the index is working, all the pages/blog posts are in a weird directory.

Home: url
Resume: url/index.php/resume
Blog: url/index.php/blog

IT ALL WORKS so I'm not gonna complain for the time being (I have enough other things to do!) but I am super curious as to know how the hell this happened. And I guess, if I were to attempt reinstall #3, are there obvious ways to avoid this happening again ...

TIA.

posted by aperturescientist to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

Best answer: What's happening on your WP Admin >> Settings >> Permalinks page? Pretty standard after any install or reinstall that you go to the Permalinks page and click Save as this updated the .htaccess file.

Which brings us to: What's happening in your .htaccess file?

And I hate to break it to you now, but all you had to do was delete the old index.html file. Hardly a collision of much consequence.
posted by humboldt32 at 1:14 PM on September 9, 2016

Response by poster: Thank you! I don't know how the hell I put that weird structure into my permalinks, but now it's fixed. I didn't actually have an .htaccess file so I made a new one. Now all is well!

And ... ahahahahaha. My instincts are always "nuke it to ground and start over". That's good to know, whew!

Thanks again, so much!
posted by aperturescientist at 9:40 AM on September 11, 2016