Whatever you want to call it. I thought I would be clever and change the name of my blog from jennysschrader.com/WordPress to jennysschrader.com/blog. There’s that fantastic General Settings page on my WordPress dashboard where I can change it with just some typing and a few clicks, so no problem, right?
Oh…so many problems.
First, there’s the whole sticky wicket of not being able to access my dashboard once I’ve saved the changes, so no way to change it back. Then there’s something to do with permalinks, which can be “pretty” or “ugly” (that one still has me befuddled). And then when I went looking for help, I didn’t realize that you have to do the process differently because my blog is connected with my site name, and that uses WordPress.org, not WordPress.com. Nevertheless, I went for it, changing code willy-nilly and uploading new files (which was also irritating, because it took me a while to figure out that I can change the code right there on the File Manager site, and don’t need to download it to Dreamweaver first). Somehow completely manage to delete both index.php files for the blog and the website itself. Thankfully (because I had downloaded to Dreamweaver) managed to upload the main site index.php from my desktop and figured out that I could just download the WordPress index.php from the WordPress site. Whew!
But wait! There’s more! Now I can access my website, but I still couldn’t access my blog—the site or the dashboard. Back to WordPress.org to do more research and discover the intricacies of phpMyAdmin. Luckily, I have cPanel, so I can access that through there. (Of course, didn’t discover that until after downloading phpMyAdmin and trying to install it–wouldn’t recommend that!) Changed the first problem, still didn’t work, more research, then realized I had to change another problem and…ta da! I’m finally back up and running.
The lesson from all of this? For the love of God, do NOT change anything unless you know what you’re doing! There are even warnings all over the place on the WordPress site. Should have listened… But I didn’t know until I tried to change it on the General Settings page (they made it look so easy there!). But I learned a valuable lesson about how to work with code and the php Admin stuff as well, so I think it was all worth it. And again, completely impressed with WordPress because if you want to do something, then you can. Tons of options. And even if you are an idiot and try something like this, there are other people out there who have screwed up on the same thing and there are forums (where they make you feel a little better about being an idiot) that help you fix it.
So I may try it again when I’m feeling a bit more adventurous. Currently, though, I’m patting myself on the back because I made a mess and fixed it and only wasted an hour or so. Not really worthy of a back pat, but still…
I’m honestly just glad that I’m not the girl who tried to help her friend change the url, got into a complete disaster of a mess, tried like crazy to fix it (I think about 54 posts on that particular topic and most of them were from her), and the poor friend just got frustrated and reinstalled WordPress, which erased everything from the blog.
I wonder if that friendship survived…