benglass

Hi WPFan,

Thanks for taking the time to reply to my questions. Sorry if some of it didn’t make sense – I’ll try and explain better:

To answer your questions:

1) “moving over from my previous iWeb” – How did you move over?
what I meant by this was to stop my old way of working, which is to publish my iweb site then put it onto the ftp server. My new way of working was (going to be) to stop using iweb to create my site, and use wordpress to create a new one afresh, then to replace my old iweb-created site with the WP one

2) Was the iWeb site on one server and the WP site on another server?
No, the WP site got immediately published onto my existing server, where the iweb site already resided. I didn’t want to do this until I was happy with the new edited WP site, but the hosting company siad this wouldn’t take effect immediately

3) “This was caused by my hosting company telling me that the WP site wouldn’t go live until I wanted” If you moved it over, how was it caused by your hosting co?

Within Hostpapa’s hosting service control panel there is something called softaculous apps installer which has a wordpress script which basically does the installing of wordpress, you set up your login etc. The reason I say it was caused by my hosting co is that I specifically asked whether the wordpress site would immediately go online (not what I wanted) or whether I could edit it to how I wanted before ditching my iweb site and using the WP one.

4) “However, I had inadvertently deleted some essential files including one folder associated with webmail. This resulted in my email accounts being deleted plus all my past emails.”

Webmail is usually a separate part of your account with your host – if you have deleted these files then it is likely your account can no longer function properly.

You’re right – what I didn’t realise is that the files uploaded by wordpress included essential stuff in order for the emails etc to work. I have always used a webmail that I can just access from my Mac Mail, and made a link to that from the contact page of the iWeb created site.

May I ask why you would try and upload an old site when your email/account no longer works?

The reason I wanted to preserve the iweb site until the new one was ready is that there is a hidden webpage about a future project – we recently sent that link to an important music producer and are hoping that it gains his interest. We don’t want him to click and get a 404 message!

In this case maybe your host needs to reset/reinstall your whole account and then you need to start over. I think this is what’s happened, as when I logged into my account at Hostpapa, it reverted to its initial settings, without any of our email addresses there ( I have since created them again)

OR maybe your host has backups – some do it weekly, etc and you can ask your host to restore your account from a back. Have you considered this?
It’s possible – I may try that although I am not hopeful judging by their response from online support. Ironically, I submitted a support ticket about the issues and my email account being deleted but they required the email to come from the original email address (deleted)!

I’m trying to deal with these issues one by one in a calm a way as possible but was hoping there was a way I could do something more enjoyable like design the new WP site as a pick-me-up, while I sort the other problems! However, the last thing I want is for the iWeb-created site to be overwritten again. Hence my asking if it was possible to edit my site without it going live and replacing my old one. I did think I could have used another domain name I’ve purchased as a temporary site then when it’s ready, publish it to the correct location (dubkasm.com) but that would require me to buy new hosting fro the other domain.

To be honest, I think it’s partly lack of research on my part as I still haven’t got my head around how the whole WP thing works! If you want to create a new site, does it have to all be on the server and to be ‘live’ for you to be able to tweak it? I did install a plugin which allowed me to place a ‘site under construction’ page, but due to the reason I mentioned earlier, I don’t want to obliterate my old site.

I hope I haven’t been too long winded and, once again, thank you for your time!

Ben