wordpress welcome page issues

Before solving that mystery, let’s see WHY this URL doesn’t work: https://www.appropriateit.org/ (without adding the index.php – as it should!)

Moshu, thanks for your response. The URL looks for welcome.php first. This is set to be called prior to index.php via htaccess.

Does that help?

It seems to me as a huge over-complication.
Why don’t you visit the Options > Reading subpanel in your admin panel to set up a painless solution (no htaccess etc.)?

The home page is a completely different look and feel from the site. The reading panel does not pull in pages outside of WP to be set as static home page. This is the reason why we had to go the htaccess route.

OK, I don’t know anything about .htaccess.
However, my common sense would dictate this:
– first make sure that the welcome.php file works by itself, i.e. can be accessed when typing the URL in the address bar
(now it has the wrong path to the blogheader)
– when it works, then try the htaccess magic (till then do NOT mess around with it; remove it)

On the other hand – if it hasa different look an dffel, why do you need the WP wp-blog-header file?

Hi Moshu,

Thanks for persisting in the hunt for the issue.

I used WP codex instructions to create the static front page for WP and to display it using htaccess. It worked fine until the move last night to DreamHost.

The home page is a mix of static and dynamic content. We needed the wp-blog-header to pull dynamic content – WP Posts.

Hope that sheds more light.

Hello All,

This issue has been resolved. In case you are interested in knowing how:

There seems to be an issue with how virtual directories are setup. After struggling for entirely too long to try to fix it, we decided to pull the home page into WordPress. Here is how we did it:

Splash Home Page
1. Create a new blank page (page 1) in WordPress. Set this to be the front page in WP Admin > Options > Reading.
2. Move welcome.php from root to theme folder
3. Use an if statement in page.php to pull or include welcome.php whenever page 1 is called.

Result – splash page is inside WP and works fine (see home page). This gives us a blank page to create the splash page from, thus providing complete independence in layout, structure, etc. Would love to hear thoughts on whether this method has any performance implications.

Blog Post Listing Page
WordPress now thinks that the splash page is the index page. But the site also needs to get it to serve the usual list of blog posts in a page, a task done by the index.php page earlier. Here is how that was done:

1. Create another blank page (page 2) in WordPress. Set this to be posts page in WP Admin > Options > Reading.
2. Copy code from index.php in the theme folder to create a new php file called file1.php.
3. Use an if statement in page.php to pull or include file1.php whenever page 2 is called.

Result – new page lists all the posts as index.php did earlier (see blog page). We are within the theme’s header, sidebar, footer, etc., for other components of the page.

Not sure if this method is optimal to get to a completely blank slate for the home page. But it is doing what we want the site to do. So, we are happy to let it be. ??

If you have a question or need more details on any of the above, please leave a note here.