@tim S, thanks so much for being ready and willing to help! I really appreciate how supportive the wp community has been.
I ended up feeling confident enough (after doing lots of reading about it!) to install phpmyadmin to my /wordpress on my host domain, and was able to repair the site URL through instructions that people posted on the forum.
What was tricky was that after I was able to log in, I had another issue, which I’ve since resolved. In hopes that it may help someone else who has a similar problem in the future, I’ve included the description of the problem and how I was able to resolve it:
“Title: pages OR posts work depending on permalink settings, but not both at once
When the default permalink setting (…/?p=123) is selected, the slider posts and blog posts DO appear on the website home page. If you click on the blog post thumbnail, the link does not work – it redirects you back to the home page. None of the drop down menus (pages) work, and you can’t navigate anywhere on the site (just takes you to girlsleap.org)
If I change the permalink setting to (…/2012/01/sample-post/) – one of the common settings, the slider and blog posts do NOT appear on the website home page. Where the blog post should be, my 404 message appears. However, all of the menu bar options DO work (with the exception of the donate button), and take you to the appropriate page. Although my blog posts won’t appear on the front page, I can access them with the direct URL (ie https://www.girlsleap.org/2012/01/up-and-up-at-upstairs-on-the-square/), which leads me to believe it’s an issue either with my .htaccess page or index.php.
The other thing to note is that when the permalink setting is (…/2012/01/sample-post/) format, if I navigate to one of the menu pages, the page will show up but the URL that is showing onscreen will still read as ‘girlsleap.org.'”
Solution:
From: https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/changed-my-blog-url-now-it-wont-recognize-im-logged-in-or-let-me-preview?replies=13
(Excerpt)
1. FTP to the site, and get a copy of the active theme’s functions.php file. You’re going to edit it in a simple text editor (like notepad) and upload it back to the site.
2. Add these two lines to the file, immediately after the initial “<?php” line.
update_option(‘siteurl’,’https://example.com/blog’);
update_option(‘home’,’https://example.com/blog’);
Use your own URL instead of example.com, obviously.
3. Upload the file back to your site, in the same location. FileZilla offers a handy “edit file” function to do all of the above rapidly, if you can use that, do so.
4. Load the login or admin page a couple of times. The site should come back up.
5. Repeat the above steps, but remove those lines. IMPORTANT: Do NOT leave those lines in there. Remove them immediately after the site is up and running again.
If there is no functions.php file in the theme: Create a new text file called “functions.php”. Edit it with notepad, and add this text to it, using your own URL instead of example.com:
<?php
update_option(‘siteurl’,’https://example.com/blog’);
update_option(‘home’,’https://example.com/blog’);
Upload that to your theme directory, then proceed as stated above. Remove the file afterwards.
