OK. Starting again. This time I’ll be a little less arrogant and do some research! I have deleted the blogs.terrywassall.org subdomain and the database and will install WPMu from scratch in a sub-directory, terrywassall.org/blogs/. I’ll update this post with anything and everything that occurs. Any problems will be reported and, assuming I can solve them, where I got the information for the fix. I don’t know how useful this will be for others but it will be a full account of how it went for a comparative beginner so it might be.
Day 1 (5/11/09 23.05): Created a sub-directory terrywassall.org/blogs/. Uploaded all the WPMu files and folders into it. That’s it for now. Before I do anything else tomorrow I will be looking at Installing in a subfolder on Andrea’s very useful WPMU Tutorials web site which I discovered today thanks to her response to my plaintive wailing on Twitter.
Day 2 (6/11/09 8.00): As warned in Installing in a subfolder, when going to terrywassall.org/blogs a message came up saying there is no wp-config file and a button inviting me to create one. This must be resisted! Don’t do it. Following the instructions I opened the wp-blog-header.php file and commented out lines 9 and 14 (not 24 as stated in Installing in a subfolder) to look as follows:
// if ( !file_exists( dirname(__FILE__) . ‘/wp-config.php’) && !file_exists( dirname( dirname (__FILE__) ) . ‘/wp- config.php’)) {
if (strpos($_SERVER['PHP_SELF'], ‘wp-admin’) !== false) $path = ”;
else $path = ‘wp-admin/’;
include( “index-install.php” ); // install WPMU!
die();
// }
On refreshing terrywassall.org/blogs/ a page appeared with an instruction to change the file permissions for a couple of folders to 777 - httpdocs/blogs and httpdocs/blogs/wp-content/. Once I had done this and refreshed again the installation form appeared. Now it was just a matter of filling the form in with the details of the database and database user I had created, choosing a name for the blog and supplying an email address. All the other fields I left as defaults but I noticed the server address was identified as terrywassall.org. I was tempted to add /blogs/to the end but didn’t. Surely the script knows best. On completing the form the installation was reported as having been successful and the admin password was displayed. This was also sent to the email address I had entered in the installation form. I clicked on the Log in button and found myself in the dashboard. So far so good.
However, on visiting the site the installation screen displayed again. I returned to the wp-blog-header.phpfile and uncommented lines 9 and 14 (as above) and on refreshing the browser the home page of the new installation opened. (There was a clue to this in Andrea’s post referenced above). Finally I returned httpdocs/blogs and httpdocs/blogs/wp-content/ to their previous file permissions.
Next task: try to create a new blog.
