Moderator
James Huff
(@macmanx)
Volunteer Moderator
Do you want the blog to be the core element of your site, or do you want it to function as an extension of your site?
I’ve done what you are speaking of, (except for the trying to make money part) and have a few thoughts:
- Don’t install wordpress in the root. It is very easy to install wordpress in a directory (home/you/public_html/wordpress) and re-direct the blog itself to the root, or a different directory if you prefer.
- WordPress works great as a light and simple CMS; I’ve used it that way on three websites so far.
- I usually don’t want a standard “blog” page as a homepage. I really like the Static Front Page plugin. If you want the “blog” to be just one section, set up the permalinks to put them in a separate section. You can also make a custom template for the homepage to include a list of the latest blog content, teasers or a full entry or two as you wish.
- If I’ve got a combo of blog-ish content and static content I’d just use WP. If I want to mix in other tools like photo gallery, forums, chat, guestbook, online games, etc., I don’t know what I would do–Integrating them so they play well with WP can be tricky, so I’d examine that carefully before I decided.
If I were to redirect the blog to the root domain, wouldn’t that require .htaccess directives to make it work? On another domain, I gave up attempting something that used WP’s own .htaccess file because that caused too many conflicts with my site’s main root .htaccess where I have some really critical redirects.
Installing WP in the root domain is probably not very secure either.
On another site http://www.beyourowndetective/blog I’m doing just that, hosting both static and blog pages. I’m waiting to see if it will greatly boost my google and yahoo traffic.
The Static front page plugin looks like a great idea, as long as it doesn’t require special .htaccess stuff that will likely cause problems with my existing .htaccess.
I’ve set up a bunch of sites using WP as a mini content management system. Yes, you can do it with the “Page” feature (is that working in 2.0? I’ve had problems . . .) but make sure you get the plugin that allows “Pages” to be searchable. There is also the plugin to make a “Page” the homepage, so you can effectively use WP in the root and have the “blogged” part of your site separate from the “static” part of your site. You can also create a home Page template so you can make your opening page look a bit different than the rest of your site, so really, there’s no reason you can’t just use WordPress for the entire site.
If I install in a separate subfolder such as /blog, can it have it redirect to the root domain without any special .htaccess directives? Does the Static Homepage Plugin also make it so the blog pages can appear in the domain root while WordPress is installed in a separate folder?
Re: WP in subfolder, index in root…
Isn’t all this stuff covered here?
http://codex.wordpress.org/Giving_WordPress_Its_Own_Directory
(for any plugin in special circumstances it is a trial and error process that you have to do for yourself)
Is installing WP in the root of the domain Ie: public_html not recommended for security reasons?
I am using multiple domain hosting under a shared IP address to host many individual domains.
Fred
