Need the correct href on index.html page

#1

I’m having difficulty hooking up my home page to a forum I created.

The home page is www.insightexchange.net. I can’t get the link to the Forum page to work.

As far as I know, I activated the Forum page. It can be accessed by going to insightexchange.net, clicking on “Gary’s Blog,” then clicking on the “Forum” link.

On my index.html page, I tried href=“http://www.forum.insightexchange.net/” but that seems to lead to the Dreamhost “Coming Soon” page.

Do I have the wrong href? Or is there something on Dreamhost I need to change?

Thanks for any help!
Jona

#2

looks like it’s trying to go to a subdomain named ‘forum.insightexchange.net’ which you probably have not configured. Gary’s blog leads to http://www.blog.insightexchange.net/?page_id=17 is this the href you need to link to?

Bill

#3

If you’re going to keep the forum at the blog you could set the forum.insightexchange.net sub-domain as a Redirect to the link Bill notes above.

Panel > Domains > Manage Domains

#4

Hi BIll,

Obviously, I’m confused about how all this works, and I appreciate your help.

I want users to be able to go to the insightexchange.net home page, click on the Forum link on the insightexchange.net home page, and be taken to the Forum area.

The Forum page should not say “Gary’s Blog” at the top; but it seems if I delete that on the Forum page, it affects the Blog page. So I must have goofed up on all this.

I want to be able to control the header and appearance of the Forum page so that it doesn’t affect the appearance of the Blog page.

Do you have any suggestions in this regard? The forum was created using Mingle, but I’m fine ditching that for another software if necessary.

Thanks again,
Jona

#5

Jona,

Is the forum a separate wordpress installation? if you want both a wordpress blog for gary and a forum you might want to host the forum separately as a separate ‘user’ in panel with a subdomain. So you could have an install of wordpress on blog.insightexchange.net and you could create an entirely separate user and subdomain of forum.insightexchange.net it’s almost like an independent website. Of course if the forum is a second wordpress installation, you could have a second directory called forum.

summary option 1:

user MainUser (what ever your username is on your dream host site)
with directories: insightexchange.net, in this directory you have a subdirectory called ‘blog’ and a subdirectory called ‘forum’ Wordpress is installed on both

Summary Option 2:

User MainUser with directory: insightexchange.net, this has a subdirectory of blog with a wordpress install of gary’s blog
user Subuser with directory forum.insightexchange.net, this has a secound wordpress install.

The reason to use Option 2 is if either one is hacked, they hack will be contained, in option 1 both will be hacked…

does this help? Is Forum a second wordpress install?

#6

Hi Bill,

The Forum is not supposed to be a second WordPress install. It was supposed to use a plug-in called Mingle. I want to be able to change the appearance of the Forum page independent of the appearance of the Blog page. Here’s what I did to create these:

  1. I created a subdomain for the Blog, under “insightexchange.net”: blog.insightexchange.net, and installed WordPress on it.

  2. I then created another subdomain – for the Forum – under “insightexchange.net”: forum.insightexchange.net, and installed Mingle on that. (A peer suggested Mingle, which is why I chose it.)

I think it would be easier just to have a forum subdomain and a blog subdomain, controlled by one user. (Hack risk will have to be a lower priority.)

Right now, going to the Forum page via the homepage brings up the “Coming Soon!” Dreamhost page.

  • Would you know what needs to be corrected here, so that the Forum page comes up? Could this be a DreamHost issue?

Going to the Forum page via the Blog page does bring up the Forum page I created, but it seems dependent on the Blog page’s layout, which I do not want. I want the Forum page layout to be independent of the Blog page.

  • Would you know how I can accomplish that? Do you suppose I installed Mingle improperly?

Bill, thank you for your patience and your help!
Jona