If you have an existing WordPress 2.0 and you’ve been using the old static_front plugin from Semiologic you might run into some issues… I was using v 2.4 of sem_static_front and once I upgraded to WordPress 2.1, the plugin wasn’t working any longer. While WordPress 2.1 now offers its own control for that setting, that too was not working correctly for me. But please, forgive us a word from our sponsors and read on…
My installation of WordPress is in a folder below my root directory. Therefore all of my WordPress folders and files are below www.soulcode.net in a folder named blog. Of course I didn’t want visitors to www.soulcode.net to be presented with a different look and feel and so I followed the WordPress codex about giving WordPress in its own directory while leaving the WordPress index.php at the root of my site. And so in the world of WordPress 2.0, using the sem_static_front plugin and the /* Short and sweet */ index.php, I was whistling dixe, bob’s your uncle, a-ok, rockin’ like dokken… in other words I had a static front page and my blog postings lived beneath www.soulcode.net/blog. Whew, all this typing’s making me thirsty… How about we sell some Carlsberg beer or something right about here…
And so, I merrily upgraded to WordPress 2.1 with illusions that it would be as easy as the upgrade from WordPress 2.02 to 2.05 and boy did I cry. In WordPress 2.1 Options/Reading the first section is titled Front Page and looks a bit like this:
Well I had selected Home to be my Home page and another page that I called Blog to be the index of my blog and it wouldn’t work. The root address of my site kept returning the latest posts, i.e., the blog index page.
By the way, I had followed the WordPress Codex in regard to these settings in the Options/General of my WordPress address (URL) and Blog address (URL). And so, WTF?
I tested on a different site, doing a fresh install of WordPress 2.1 and using the Options/Reading/Front Page settings and they worked like a charm. I searched the WordPress support forums but found no definitive answers… until I came across this very confusing document. It is written reasonably clearly, however, the authors provide too many options, and like a witch doctor in a drugstore I was overwhelmed. And so I took off my shirt, smeared my chest with chicken grease and downloaded the Filosofo Home-Page Control. I uploaded it to the /wp-content/plugins/ folder and activated it in the Plugins Dashboard section and it ‘just worked’. I left its Home-Page Page option set at WordPress Default and its Blog directory option blank. This is rather strange behavior from code, essentially I’ve activated a plugin which is telling WordPress to do what it is already configured to do that is, use a certain page as the index of my site and another “page” as the index of my blog.
