Moving Wordpress Within the Site

[alika]

I have an existing live static site since 2005 that I want to replace with Wordpress.

I did the development in http://www.example.com/wordpress. Now that I am completed, I moved it to the root so that opening http://www.example.com will show the new Wordpress site

I am able to login to the new destination (www.example.com/wp-login.php instead of the old www.example.com/wordpress/wp-login.php) and able to get inside. I even checked the database -- wp_options table and the site_url under the options name has indeed moved to http://www.example.com

But I am not seeing my new Wordpress site. I still see my current site.

And to avoid the problem of redirection, I used the current URLs to my Wordpress URL so that when I am finished and move the Wordpress to the root, I can see the "Wordpress version" of my old pages. But it is not happening. I still see the old version

How can I show the new "Wordpress version" of the site?

I have the databases and files backedup. And I have not deleted the http://www.example.com/wordpress yet

[alika]

Reading Wordpress' Codex [codex.wordpress.org...] I have two basic questions:

1 - What does moving to "root directory" mean? In FTP, does it mean the same level as the www or inside the www as all the other files are? My webhost said it cannot be the same level as www, and it has to be inside. So I moved everything under www

2 - What files should I move? Should I move all files, or just some key files?

Thanks

[ergophobe]

Do you still have an index.html file? Typically, Apache is set up to look for that first, then index.php. So when you type in example.com/ it will bring up the index.html file and not invoke WP

1. Root is the highest level that the public can access on your server via a browser. So it's usually within www/ or putblic_html/ (on Apache anyway). It cannot be the same level as www because there is no public access at that level. s

So it should look like this if you were access your server and could see the whole path (you may not be able to depending on setup)
/some/path/www/index.php
/some/path/www/wp-content
etc

2. You need to move all files so that they have the same relationship (that is so that whatever directory holds index.php also holds wp-config.php and wp-content sub directory.

[alika]

Thanks ergophobe. I was able to move the Wordpress successfully and change my homepage to it.

It just took several calls to my web host to actually find someone knowledgeable. But the site is now up and running so I am happy :o)

[ergophobe]

Congratulations! I know it's been a long haul. Hopefully now you can get back to creating great articles instead of struggling with admin stuff!