Robin, I agree this is a good way, and should help Danny with his concerns about working on an active website. I use it myself, and it is very effective once you understand carefully what to put in the path.php file for a given folder. As you showed with your link, it’s well documented.
I wanted to address one or two more of the questions Danny keeps asking, one way or another.
—on Pages and paths. Yes, you can use the Pages ability to actually appear to have an html file when none is present in an EE installation. I tried it to physically verify last night, but from the way EE works it is also clear.
What helps to understand this is to see the basic EE model of processing, which for some reason is nearly a hidden element. It is actually very simple at the top. EE is called by the index.php part of the path, which occurs right after the site URL. All the other parts of the path are looked at by EE to decide what template to call, and what variations of data and flags are sent to it.
So EE can decide if part of your path is ‘about’, ‘about-us’, ‘about-us.html’, or about-us.wazoo’, that it should reply from its ‘about’ template. You can set up a specific mapping you want using Pages. You specify the artificial ‘pagename’ you want, and the template you want it to call, using the Pages tab of the template editor. You can do this for more than one fake template if you need more than one match - like about.html and about.htm. You just point the extras to the same active template, say ‘about’. The extra templates can be dummies since they will never be called.
I would question that you need or should do this for something as generic as ‘about-us’. Surely no-one links to that, so the new simple address in the EE site ought to be fine. Probably you have some mystery you don’t want to tell us which is the hot linked page, and you can use the above to accomplish keeping an equivalent around for these old links. Be sure you match the ‘htm/html’ naming exactly. I don’t think you need multiple names anywhere.
Before you ask it, no, none of this will be affected in inself by an .htaccess file of any normal kind. Your whole site can be, but consider the explanation above, and realize that the index.php file is invoked no matter what you do to ‘hide’ it, as so many of us do.
—on all these questions you ask around circles, Danny, I think there is really one solution. You should invest in a $99 Personal license.
Then you get all the modules including Pages. You get support. You can build the site up in another directory, so it’s out of the way always. As Robin suggests, you can operate the site from there, but also from a third directory to mimic the eventual root installation, with nothing in it but index.php copied, path.php copied and modified, and possibly an .htaccess, when you get to that. You can try all this out, and see for yourself (and learn to set it up, a step at a time). Your installation site is there to work with always, until you do get the separate directory method worked out.
Similarly, you can try out (and work out your own) the ‘classic method’ so many of us use for removing the index.php name in the URL, from Robin’s document.
I think you will find that hands on experience is the key for most anyone here. Some of us may even be ‘experts’ of some kind, or not at all, but everyone gets it done this way. There are too many variations to do otherwise. EE is a very useful system, and a pretty practical one when you get down to it. It’s really the web, php, and other gremlins that make things complicated; and so you need to become familiar and confident with enough of the patterns that work. Not much different from your Dreamweaver html and css there.
You’re fortunate to have the html/css background, as EE is designed to fit that.
If you do this off-site/onsite method, you’ll properly gain confidence. And then when the day comes, it takes installing 2 files on the root of the system, while renaming the original index.html. Three files if you use an .htaccess. That’s all.
You’ll know it will work, because you’ll have learned from your efforts before. You’ll have most of those two (or three) files from having done it already by running your original installation from another directory. And you’ll know why and how to change the path.php so running from root directory will work just as well, from your installation which has never moved.
Danny, I hope this helps. Support is support, and you can notice they help people when those persons try and learn themselves. Then there is something besides the hypothetical to work with, and also they can be confident that a persons is learning to fish, and support themselves.
Kind regards,
Clive
It’s easy enough to move it up a directory- I’d just put a copy of index.php and path.php on the main level- then switch the path to the system folder so it drills down one more level (in your path.php file). Change your path settings in the EE backend where needed and you’re good to go.
As to htaccess- that’s not officially supported as how/whether it works may vary by server. But the wiki has a nice entry on a couple of ways to do it via htaccess. (I do it myself.)