Comments on: Moving a WordPress Site to a New Host and Domain – WpSiteBuilding.com

By: Herbert-Jan van Dinther

Herbert-Jan van Dinther — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 18:55:49 +0000

@David: Plugins willgive you extra functionality and sometimes they will have a widget that you can use in a sidebar.

You can have a scroller in the top of your site. There are a few plugins that can help, but you can use javascripts to. It depends largely on the theme you choose and how you style your site.
Forms, donation systems en podcast, it can all be done, but it will take some time to find the right plugins.

So too answer you main question, no, you sites layout is no solely depending on sidebars! You can do a lot more with WordPress…

If you want to see some great examples of interactive sites check out the cheap premium themes on ThemeForest WordPress Themes

By: David

David — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 21:48:06 +0000

I want to update our very old website by both changing its overall looks and make it interactive. I am confused about plugins. Are these relegated to sidebars & footers only? For example, I want a large vertical scroller on my homepage. I do not want it in a sidebar or narrow column. Will a scroller plugin work or will I have to use Javascript?
I will also require forms, credit.debit card donation system, , and podcast.

I guess my primary question is: Are my interactive design options dependent on the sidebars for the placcement of my widgets?

Thanks for your consideration. David

By: Herbert-Jan van Dinther

Herbert-Jan van Dinther — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 21:02:00 +0000

@Lee: This would be a question you can put in the support forum of StudioPress of wich you get access after the purchase of the theme.

It looks however like you should reinstall the Genesis theme, either via zip file installation (Genesis 1.5 is the most current at this time) or via FTP.

The error states that you are missing a file from the Genesis Framework that is needed the get the Lexicon child theme to work located.

Keep in mind that you should install Genesis before the child theme.

Hope this helps to get you site going without problems.

By: Lee

Lee — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 16:54:33 +0000

Hi,

Setting up my website with WordPress. When I try to upload a theme from a zip file, I get this message:
Warning: require_once(/home/content/71/7420171/html/wordpress/wp-content/themes/genesis/lib/init.php) [function.require-once]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/content/71/7420171/html/wordpress/wp-content/themes/lexicon/functions.php on line 3

Fatal error: require_once() [function.require]: Failed opening required ‘/home/content/71/7420171/html/wordpress/wp-content/themes/genesis/lib/init.php’ (include_path=’.:/usr/local/php5/lib/php’) in /home/content/71/7420171/html/wordpress/wp-content/themes/lexicon/functions.php on line 3

Now, everytime I log into the site, that message appears. Can you help?

By: Craig

Craig — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 19:18:12 +0000

Awesome! Thanks for the reply and step-by-step tip!

By: Herbert-Jan van Dinther

Herbert-Jan van Dinther — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 18:50:18 +0000

@Graig: What you can do is to install WordPress in a subfolder like /cms
You can then build the site next to the live one and making sure your permalinks for the pages reflect the old ones (in the development phase it will have /cms/page-url.html)
Make sure your keep the post slugs the same as the old site URLs. (use a plugin like “.html on pages” if you currently use the .html extension.

Once you are happy with the new site you can follow these steps:

1. remove or rename the index.html from your old site.
2. copy the index.php and .htaccess file from your subdirectory to the root
3. change one line in the index.php file to require(‘./cms/wp-blog-header.php’);
4. change only the Blog address in the General settings to the domein name.
5. Remove the old .html files.

If you do it this way, your site will be “down” for about 5 minutes and if you made sure the urls stay the same, you won’t loose any rankings or visitors.

Of course you have made a backup first of your old site :-)

By: Craig

Craig — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 17:18:20 +0000

Thank you for such an informative website. I build sites using Adobe GoLive. WordPress for a CMS site is a great idea. An unrelated but related comment here: When you move a fully developed site in HTML to WordPress (same domain name), does that mean once you make the switch you basically killed the old site pages (in HTML) and now have to quickly populate the new site pages (in WordPress) with all the content from the old pages? In other words, you can’t build a WordPress site offline like you can a GoLive or HTML site, by creating it on your hard drive first? Hope that question makes sense. A simple answer is all that’s needed. Seems like once you install WordPress onto that domain name, you begin at zero and need to add everything back. So a site could be “down” for 1-4 weeks, depending, until it is back to normal. Right?