How can I work on a WordPress theme already installed in the root directory?

Posted by Isaac Lubow on Pro Webmasters See other posts from Pro Webmasters or by Isaac Lubow
Published on 2011-01-13T11:49:47Z Indexed on 2011/01/13 11:58 UTC
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Wordpress

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htaccess

I have WordPress installed at the root level of a website. I thought it would be easy enough to have a "coming soon" page called default.html and edit the .htaccess file as follows:

AddHandler php5-script .php
DirectoryIndex default.html index.php
# BEGIN WordPress
# END WordPress

...so that visitors to the site are sent to the default page, and I could manually specify index.php as my destination for testing. (This isn't a high-security job.) But index.php is redirecting me to the default page. When I remove the DirectoryIndex line, the index.php file is found automatically by visitors to the site root, but... that's the page I was trying to hide.

What am I doing wrong with .htaccess and how can I get it to behave the way I want?

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