Sonic.net

I'm still trying to get WordPress installed on my website. There's been no response to my comment in my other thread from a week ago that Sonic's installer gave me an error message. I wrote to Sonic support this morning and was told that the installer failed because the target directory wasn't empty. So I created a subdirectory (wintertime.com/wpstuff) and tried again; still no luck.

I then called Sonic support and got someone who had vaguely heard of WordPress but didn't know that Sonic had an installer for it. I then said it was fine with me if Sonic did the installation; the installer page says, "If you'd like us to install WordPress, please let us know where to put it." The phone rep checked with a supervisor who said they didn't handle such problems.

I've been telling people for years and years how good Sonic's support is, but if I can't even get support for one of your own member tools, that's very sad. Can someone at Sonic please figure out why the automated installer isn't working so we can fix that and I can do the installation myself. Or, alternatively, go ahead and install it yourselves in the specified directory? Help, please!

Hi Patty,

Does the installer work if you delete the directory "wpstuff" and then tell it to install there? In this case, I believe it wants to create that directory itself and then install rather than install to the existing sub-directory (despite it being empty).

If that works, you can then use FTP or shell to move *all* the files from the WordPress directory (the .php files and directories) into your root directory.

After moving the files, there's one more important step. You will need to edit the wp-config.php file and change the "WP_SITEURL" constant from http://yourdomain.com/wpstuff to http://yourdomain.com (where yourdomain.com is the actual domain you've installed it to).

Drew, we are making progress!!

You were right about the subdirectory. I deleted "wpstuff" and then asked your installer to put WP in a folder by that name, and it created the subdirectory on the fly. I then moved all of the files to the top level of wintertime.com.

I made the change you mentioned in wp-config.php, and I am now able to enter the WP admin screen and load my desired theme. However, none of my WP pages or media library items are showing up. I see instructions on the Wordpress codex for moving files to a different domain. There are some steps I don't quite understand, so I'll ask those questions on the Wordpress forums.

Do things look okay if you click the link to a post or page from the editor? I think right now the index.html file is taking precedence over the index.php when you visit the site. So unless you go directly to one of the post or page URL's, the old HTML index file is going to take over when visiting the site's root.

I may not have understood correctly when you said "none of my WP pages or media library items are showing up". At this point, there shouldn't need to be any settings changes or any action required to "move the site".

Hi, Drew. None of my pages or portfolios are visible in the WP administration tools, so they just plain aren't on wintertime.com yet. I think I need to do something to move or copy them to the new domain. I've posted a question about that in the WP forums.

Once I get them working in the admin tool, I can address the issue you mentioned of the index.html file taking precedence over the index.php file. I might actually want to keep it that way, but with a link from index.html to the home page of my WP site. I'm only converting half of my website to WP.

Ah yes, since we installed a clean copy of Wordpress it has no content in it. Posts, pages, and media are all entries in the Wordpress database, which would need to be exported from an old site and imported into the new one.

I thought you might have created some new pages/posts that weren't showing up. The page on exporting content here might be a guide to what you're looking for: https://en.support.wordpress.com/export/

Okay, I ran the Export tool from pattywinter.com and the Import tool on wintertime.com. My media library is fine. According to the XML file, my portfolio pages also got transferred, but they aren't showing up in my Portfolios folder. (A folder added by the Perfect Portfolio theme.) I'll take that up with the theme developers.

BTW, Drew, I deleted index.html and now WordPress is controlling my home page, so you were right about that.

I'll post again if I need any more help with the Sonic servers (database or website), but for now, I think I need to sort things out with the theme developer. Thanks!

Sounds like you're close. Hopefully the theme developer can figure out why that didn't carry across from the export/import.

Good luck with the rest of the site development!