how do i make my blog url, whatever.com/main.html

[Tommy]

how do i make my blog url, whatever.com/main.html

so i can use a warning page

its an existing site so its gotta be main.html

[Cleo]

I'm not sure how you change your blog's default index page but you can add a line in htaccess to change what is the default index page.

DirectoryIndex warning.html index.html index.htm

The above will cause warning.html to become the default index page and if that isn't found then index.html and if that isn't found then index.htm etc.

[Tommy]

yeah but I wanna keep the existing structure

so I need a main page
which right now is main.html

[Cleo]

What page loads when you go to the root of the domain now?

[Tommy]

the blog index.php

[Cleo]

I'm not sure I understand what you are trying to do.

domain.com/index.php is what loads now and you want that to be the main page instead of the root page so that you can throw up a warning page.

DirectoryIndex index.html index.php

The above will cause index.html to load when you go to your domain and you can then put a link on index.html that goes to index.php so that you don't have to touch the existing structure.

[cd34]

Settings, Reading, Front Page Displays:

A static page, Front Page - page needs to be a page created by Wordpress

Or, do you want to hit http://blog.com/main.html and have the blog show up?


RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^main.html$ index.php [L]

[Tommy]

Or, do you want to hit http://blog.com/main.html and have the blog show up?


RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^main.html$ index.php [L]



yes thats what i want
http://www.blog.com/main.html and have the blog show up

but when i added the code to the htaccess it didnt work. it gave me the word press 404 page

and the root of the domain still loads index.php

this is what i got in the htaccess file

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^main.html$ index.php [L]
RewriteOptions inherit

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://([a-z0-9-]+\.)*domain.com [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(asf|mpg|mpeg|wmv|avi|rm|gif|jpe|jpg)$ http://www.domain.com/ [NC,R,L]




# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

[Tommy]

so I need

http://www.blog.com/main.html - to be the blog
http://www.blog.com/ - warning page

[cd34]

What I would do then is create a static page within Wordpress to be your warning page, change it to display the warning page.

Then, when someone hits the front page of your blog, wordpress will show your crafted warning page, and then you can send them to the posts page. All of this is done within wordpress. I see why that rule doesn't work.... and offhand, I don't see an elegant solution for that.

[dunc]

I haven't used this yet, but bookmarked it a while ago.

Its a warning page plugin (http://www.rjeevan.com/projects/wordpress/plugins/wp-door/wp-door-wordpress-plugin-for-content-warning) for Wordpress

[cd34]

warning.html is your warning page. Easy enough to put that in as a static file as wordpress only answers if there is no actual file present.

main.html is your main page -- this is where the problem starts. Since that page doesn't exist, wordpress is going to handle it and look for main.html as a permalink, which it won't find, which means wordpress will show a 404 page.

Since the 404 page hands an error 404, even if you customize your 404 template to look right, google will see the 404 and remove it. Rewrites do literally nothing unless you want to do a redirect. If you don't to the rewrite, you will find that your internal links on the blog will not work correctly. Even going to http://yourblog.com/index.php, wordpress redirects it to http://yourblog.com/

To have the blog answer as main.html and work without a redirect, I'm not sure. Since main.html is an invalid permalink structure, the main.html portion will be the difficult part. With some simple experimentation, I wasn't able to get it to do what you wanted.

So, if you wanted to have warning.html, you can create that file and it will be served. If you do DirectoryIndex to make the warning.html your primary, your blog won't show up properly if you use permalinks. I think this might be one of those situations where dropping it in place MIGHT prove difficult.

Can you 301 the main.html to your main blog page? or is it 100% set in stone that you have to have main.html?

[walrus]

For the record, it's easy to setup a page within WP that is your default front page instead of the normal blog page. The best instructions I've found is here http://www.richandstephsipe.com/wordpress/2007/02/12/wordpress-21-static-homepage/


What I do is I take page.php, rename it to whatever, home, welcome, etc. and then edit it to look the way I want.

I call mine home-page-template.php. You'll need to add the following code to the top of the template as well
<?php /*
Template Name: Home Page Template
*/
?>

Then create a new page, give it a title and scroll down on the right hand side under attributes and select that page as the template. Save.

Then under settings/reading set the front page to the page you just created.

Now create another new page, call it anything you want but this will be your blog. Under attributes/templates select default template.

Then go back to settings/reading and set this page as the page for post pages.

If you want to see an example.... http://obsessedgirls.com/

[whitey]

That is a good solution. Walrus.

One that I use is simply to put the blog in a directory and put a warning page on the root. There are several advantages to this, one of which is you have two distinct parts of the domain on which to do link exchanges. It also provides another page on which to exchange good links.

Following is one of the sites I do that on. It has an SEO landing page in front, and a link to the blog at the bottom.

Older Women R Us (http://www.olderwomenrus.com/)

I intend to add a small review section in another subdirectory.

I have also experimented with having the blog on a sub-domain and that has other advantages and disadvantages, but really does not address the core root issue of a warning page.

[Tommy]

I got it to work !!!!!!

I used this in my htaccess to force the index.html - warning page
DirectoryIndex index.html

Then
I installed this plugin
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/html-on-pages/
which makes all the pages html

then i created a new page called main
and set that as the posts page

it was really simple and it works perfectly

[HowlingWulf]

Why does the blog extension have to be .html? It's a php file.
You could have moved the index.php to blog.php and then use index.php for the warning page. Then in General->Settings type in blog.php for the blog url.

[Tommy]

because its an existing AVS site that has traffic going to main.html and the warning page

its done really poorly in the search engines and I am hoping that a blog would do better

and I think the blog posts can help sell the avs membership

[Cleo]

because its an existing AVS site that has traffic going to main.html and the warning page
All this time I thought it was already a blog.

[whitey]

because its an existing AVS site that has traffic going to main.html and the warning page

its done really poorly in the search engines and I am hoping that a blog would do better

and I think the blog posts can help sell the avs membership

Pretty elegant solution to getting WP to replace run and existing, html structured site.