Previewing Site Changes Before Publication

[kswanson0018@yahoo.com]

I currently have an active site through Hostgator, built originally through one of their software services. I am trying to redo the site via this child theme, building from scratch so that I can just replace the whole thing when I am ready. I don’t care to edit my current site, but I was hoping to keep the old site live until then.

Every time that I try to preview anything that I am doing in the Austin WordPress theme, it just takes me to my active website. The active site doesn’t show any edits.

So,

1. Am I actually editing my current site rather than building from scratch? And if so, if the preview is bringing me to my current site (in preview mode), shouldn’t it be showing edits?
2. How do I see a preview of my new theme so that I know what I’m actually working on? Is this a problem because I have an active Hostgator-sponsored site, but I am doing this new theme outside of their control panel?

[Raghavendra]

Do you think you can quickly check with Hostgator support on this? I can take a closer look only if you post a temp login to the dev site so that I can actually see live the issue occurring. I am not able to fully grasp what exactly is going on from the description above. Thanks.

[kswanson0018@yahoo.com]

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[Raghavendra]

If my understanding is right – you have dev site in the main domain http://www.kswansonart.com/ while the live site is another wordpress installation at home folder – http://www.kswansonart.com/home. Is my understanding right?

This may be a htaccess configuration issue. Is the default htaccess file content in the dev folder same as the one suggested here? –

https://codex.wordpress.org/htaccess

There seems to be some form of redirection from http://www.kswansonart.com/ to http://www.kswansonart.com/home due to incorrect web server configuration.

I am afraid I may need access to the cpanel or ftp access to take a look at the site configuration if the issue still remains unresolved with default htaccess file content in http://www.kswansonart.com/ installation.

[kswanson0018@yahoo.com]

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[Raghavendra]

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[kswanson0018@yahoo.com]

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[Raghavendra]

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[kswanson0018@yahoo.com]

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[Raghavendra]

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[kswanson0018@yahoo.com]

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[Raghavendra]

I am not familiar with the solution suggested by Hostgator. My inputs were based on the way we have managed our sites here and it should work without issues.

As long the /dev/ folder has its own wordpress installed (install WordPress manually and do not use tools provided by cpanel or Hostgator) and htaccess is configured right, there should be no issue accessing the URL http://kswansonart.com//dev/. You will need to create the required DB and provide the required values in wp-config.php file in /dev/ folder. If you do not feel comfortable with this – I would suggest that you work closely with hostgator support to resolve this.

Again, work towards having the live site at http://www.kswansonart.com/ and not http://www.kswansonart.com/home. You can always configure another site for dev at http://dev.kswansonart.com/ as suggested by them. It looks really artificial and risky to have the redirect to the http://www.kswansonart.com/home when the WordPress is installed in the root folder. Things may not work as expected in future even if you temporarily resolve this somehow with the help of hostgator support. My guess – they would not have too much expertize with WordPress and hence things can break unexpectedly if you continue to redirect to http://www.kswansonart.com/home without having a folder /home/ with WordPress installed in it. Hope this helps and hope you will be able to get this resolved soon.

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