Publishing with Mac/iWeb

[Sapphyre]

Can anyone tell me what the client needs to change? Her site came out published as a subdirectory:
http://www.domain.com/www.domain.com/myhomepage.htm
It all works - there's an index.html using a meta refresh to her chosen homepage and all the links work as constructed, but all have the extraneous subdirectory

These are the instructions I gave her - she said worked brilliantly (LOL!) - what's causing the extra www.domain.com in there? How does she get them to publish directly into the www ?

In iweb select your site, and Under ‘Site Publishing Settings’, the first box of settings:
- Publish To: FTP Server
- Site Name: Name of my Site at Host (anything you wish that helps you distinguish this site from others you have)
- Contact Email: xxxl@gmail.com (any of your own email addresses)

This second box of settings is the important one:

Server address: domain.com
Use namer: user
Password: pass
*Directory/Path: domain-www
Protocol: FTP Port: 21

Website URL: http://domain.com


*A note about directory/path: you *might* need to start this with a slash /domain.com
I’m not sure with iWeb. Try first without and if you get an error publishing, then try it with the slash.

Click “Publish Site” at the bottom left or go to File and choose “Publish Site Changes” or “Publish Entire Site”.
If you are prompted to overwrite the pages on the server, in most cases, YES would be the correct answer.

After the publishing is complete, go to your browser and verify if everything looks okay. Contact us if anything is not okay and you are unable to fix it yourself.

You can use the “File Manager” in your /menu ( http://domain.com/menu ) to check and see if the pages were indeed put into the proper folder in your account – click on “domain-www” and you should see your new pages there with today’s date.

Also, the meta refresh in the index.html to the other files - did she do that manually or to fix her booboo or did iweb create that index.html page because she didn't have an appropriately named page that would commonly be known to be one of the standard index page names?

[Sapphyre]

Uh oh,
I think I see my error:
"*A note about directory/path: you *might* need to start this with a slash /domain.com"
(I should have wrote /domain-www )

Looks like directory/path should just be a slash only or left blank - i.e. the FTP automatically connects at the /home/owner/domain-www/ level rather than /home/owner/ level?

[Arf]

yep, that's exactly what I see on all these iweb sites. In one form or another there's an index.html file in the www directory and then another directory that contains all the files.

[Sapphyre]

yep, that's exactly what I see on all these iweb sites. In one form or another there's an index.html file in the www directory and then another directory that contains all the files.

Wow really? It's not just her?!?

and who's the geniass who thought making it unconventional be a good idea?

[Arf]

and who's the geniass who thought making it unconventional be a good idea?

APPLE!

[Sapphyre]

JOYJOY!
We figured out how to eliminate the extra folder!

Code: Select all

- Publish To: FTP Server
- Site Name: domain-www   (or public_html  - i.e. match the name of the public web folder)
- Contact Email: xxxl@gmail.com (any of your own email addresses)

Server address: domain.com
Use namer: user
Password: pass
Directory/Path:             (leave empty!)
Protocol: FTP Port: 21

Website URL: http://domain.com    (or http://www.domain.com if preferred)

And if they have add-on domains in CPanel and are publishing them separately with iWeb:

Code: Select all

- Publish To: FTP Server
- Site Name: addonfoldername (i.e. match the directory created in CPanel for the add-on domain)
- Contact Email: xxxl@gmail.com (any of your own email addresses)

Server address: domain.com   (primary domain credentials)
Use namer: user                    
Password: pass
Directory/Path: domain-www            (or public_html - i.e. match the name of the public web folder of the primary domain)
Protocol: FTP Port: 21

Website URL: http://addondomain.com    (or http://www.addondomain.com if preferred)

SO, site name is the folder you wish to put the files in, and directory/path is whatever is one level up from there.

[Sapphyre]

Another tip: iWeb published a dumb index.html which simply redirects via meta refresh to the actual chosen home page such as Home.html or Welcome.html (from what I understand it's the first page which appears under the site name in the "site organizer" column in iWeb)

Because, for most of us, our Apache conf already specifies all of these possibilities, the index.html page created and published by iWeb is unneeded because our server would find the right page without it. But index.html has precedence because it's earlier in the Apache conf spec DirectoryIndex. The result is all visitors including SE landing on index.html and being refreshed to the actual page (or having to click a link to it if refresh is disabled in the browser.)

Rather than instruct the client always delete the index.html after publishing, reset the precedence of the possible index pages in the user's .htaccess:

DirectoryIndex Home.html Welcome.html index.html

So, the correct page will be shown right off, and should the user select a different page name in the future as their first page, at least they're still covered by the refresh in the index.html as a fallback.