Help! Did I just lose all my work?

[Talisman]

Well, I finished up the final touches on Bottega-2 to get the client’s website ready to go live again, but when I took down the “Pardon our Dust” index.htm page I’d put up while I was working, it killed the site! I’ve tried unassigning and reassigning the domain to make sure it’s pointing to the WP install. Nothing doing. Then I realized the index.php file was missing from the main WP directory, so I uploaded the index.php file from a basic WordPress installation. Still nothing. I get a crazy-looking page of links and broken images. See http://thetalismanrestaurant.com/main

Help! I’ve never had this happen before. No clue how to fix it other than reinstalling WordPress and the theme again from scratch…but that would mean two more days of work re-tweaking everything I’ve just fixed!

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Jennie

[Talisman]

PS – I also cannot login to wp-admin. Going to http://thetalismanrestaurant.com/main/wp-admin brings up a 404 Not Found page. But when I look into the directories through FTP, everything is still there. Really weird.

[Bill Robbins]

Jennie,

I took a look at the source of your site and it still has your WordPress address as /main. Generally when you’re moving WordPress to a different directory, you need go to Settings > General and change the “WordPress Address URL.” That’s probably also why you’re locked out of wp-admin right now.

Here’s what I would do. In your Bluehost admin panel, open up the phpMyAdmin to take a look at your database directly. Inside the options table you can find the WordPress address and Site address. Try changing the WordPress address to your new URL and update that entry. Then do the same to the Site one.

Hopefully that will let you back in. I think this happens to every WordPress developer sometime or another.

Bill

[Talisman]

Thing is, the site has always been installed in /main. I didn’t move the installation or change the URLs for home or site URL in Settings. Really, really confusing. I’ll go in and try your fix and see what happens. Changing the functions.php file didn’t help….

Thanks! Will let you know what happens.

Jennie

[Talisman]

Just checked, and both are correct. Both point to http://thetalismanrestaurant.com/main. ???

Guess I’ll get on chat with BlueHost and see what they can tell me. I’m totally at a loss!

Thanks,
Jennie

[Bill Robbins]

I noticed two redirects when I click on a link to visit your site. Something’s not set right, but I don’t think you’ll lose your data at all.

[Talisman]

That’s probably because I’ve just unassigned both domains (talismanrestaurant.com and thetalismanrestaurant.com) so I can point them at the root directory, which has a “Pardon Our Dust” message so people don’t go to the messed up WP install. I truly cannot figure out what happened. I literally just repointed both domains at thetalismanrestaurant.com/main once I had the Bottega upgrade ready to roll. But when I did that, the whole thing fell apart, and now I have no structure to the site–just a list of links and broken images. It really looks like the index.php is missing from /main, but it’s there and correct.

Can’t get BlueHost to answer, so I’m putting in a support ticket and calling it a night. If you have any brain waves, I’d be glad to hear what you think!

All the best,
Jennie

[Talisman]

Okay, now I am totally confused — I just clicked my own link (above) for the heck of it, and up comes the site all find and dandy with images in place and all!

Now this is AFTER I’ve just “unassigned” both domains from CPanel and reassigned them to point at the main public_html/thetalismanrestaurant

EH? Did I perhaps have a problem of multiple redirects canceling each other out or something? I’ve never heard of such a thing, but here we are!

Scratching my head and muttering… After 15 years of doing HTML, XHTML, CSS and CSS-5, you would think nothing could surprise me. But this takes the cake!

Thanks for all the help. I’m afraid to mess with anything now that it’s working again!

Warmly,
Jennie

[Bill Robbins]

However it happened, I’m glad it’s up again.

[Talisman]

Had to refresh the permalinks to get the menus working again, but that’s all fine now.

Here’s my dilemma, though. Do I reassign the domains again to point to http://thetalismanrestaurant.com/main? Because if you go to http://thetalismanrestaurant.com or talismanrestaurant.com, you get a blank page. I know Google doesn’t like automatic redirects, so I prefer to simply tell the domains to point to the WordPress install. After the mess I’ve been through in the past two hours, I’m leery of doing that, though.

Is there another option that Google won’t mark with a red flag?

Thanks,
Jennie

[Bill Robbins]

I’ll be honest, it’s not my area of expertise. You could probably set in a 301 redirect and Google wouldn’t frown on that.

[Talisman]

Righto. Will give a couple of different options a try and see what happens. Many, many thanks for help above and beyond the call of duty — and for a totally gorgeous, easy-to-use theme that my client loves.

All the best,
Jennie

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