Test Driving WordPress

There is a lot to think about in preparation for putting WordPress on our site and ramming our site down its throat. The first thing I needed to do was set up a “test” area on my site to start working on all of this. If it is a complete failure, then I can delete the test area and go on about my business, and if it is a success, I would then move it up into the root directory to allow it to take over. Lots of decisions to make!

So I created the test area. I set up a subfolder on my website called “test”. Yes, I come up with imaginative names, but it works. I then used the Famous 5-Minute Installation of WordPress, which actually took less than five minutes because I’d already been through the setup of the database before with my blog, and set it to reside in the /test/wordpress/ folder on my site.

Within minutes I realized that search engine and spamming spiders and robots could still track me down, and the last thing I wanted was to have my test site, in all its ugliness as I hacked and whacked at it, be sitting exposed on some search engine. I needed to “hide” the test folder from the search engines.

I dug around and finally found some help, but not as much as I wanted. It did the trick though.

In the WordPress Codex, I found a helpful bit on Hiding Your Blog, and then on the web I found Clockwatcher’s Introduction to htaccess and CodeNewbie’s Hiding files and Directories from Search Bot Spiders. These helped me to change my htaccess file to hide the test folder.

Now, it was time to start really seeing what WordPress was made of and how I was going to mangle it to fit my own needs.