I have a WordPress installation at the following:
http://www.domain.com/wordpress/
Good.
When a use goes to http://www.domain.com I want it to redirect to http://www.domain.com/wordpress/
That’s easy to do. Just a little .htaccess entry and you’re all set.
however I want to hide the /wordpress/ so the user only sees http://www.domain.com
Huh? Now that’s tricky and not really worth the effort.
You can move WordPress but hiding that like that isn’t really practical. Also I don’t know how to do that. 😉
Backup the whole works, all your files and database and put that somewhere safe. This is your safety net.
http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Backups
http://codex.wordpress.org/Backing_Up_Your_Database
http://codex.wordpress.org/Restoring_Your_Database_From_Backup
Now give this a read.
http://codex.wordpress.org/Moving_WordPress
If there is no website or files at your / directory then extract the WordPress files into that directory. I am assuming you are using the current 3.3.2 version.
http://wordpress.org/latest.zip
You directories (not files) there will look like this.
/
/wordpress
/wp-content
/wp-includes
/wp-admin
Copy all of the /wordpress/wp-content files and directory into /wp-content. Don’t move them, just copy them.
Copy /wordpress/wp-config.php into /wp-config.php.
Now visit http://www.domain.com/wordpress/wp-admin/options-general.php and change the WordPress Address (URL) and Site Address (URL) to both be http://www.domain.com (less the /wordpress part) and save that.
Visit http://www.domain.com/wp-admin/options-permalink.php and re-save your permarlinks.
In your /wordpress directory rename the old .htaccess file to .htaccess-old. Create a new /wordpress/.htaccess file and put these lines in it.
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
</IfModule>
That will handle your old URLs.
The last thing is to use a search and replace to find all references of http://www.domain.com/wordpress to http://www.domain.com.
Try this plugin for search and replace.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/safe-search-replace/
Of you you are comfortable with it and can follow the instructions, this is a really good one too. It’s not a plugin but it’s easy to use, just delete it once you are done.
http://interconnectit.com/124/search-and-replace-for-wordpress-databases/
And if anything really goes wrong, just restore the files and database. That will put you back to square one.
