Omeka Blue Host

After doing the blue host one click install of Omeka, I have access to the dashboard but the site is not showing up. http://www.midwiferyincolonialamerica.com/admin/

For reference I'm trying to help Bonnie sort this out. Is this some kind of mod rewright thing?

Thanks Trevor. Looks like you figured it out, because I can see her site.

So it looks like the problem is that you can get to the front public page, but no other public-side pages?

A missing .htaccess is the most likely cause of the admin side working but not the public. Make sure that the .htaccess file in the site's root is there, with exactly that name.

Exactly! I am able to go from the dashboard to the home page but when I try to go to other pages I get the 404 error screen. I am not a computer programer so I don't know where to look for the .htaccess file.

Ok, I think I can help you with that next time we meet for class bonnie. If you want to get this ironed out sooner than that you might consider calling Bluehost and asking for some tech support. If I am following this right, we just need to make sure that the .htaccess file is in the root directory. Bluehost should have a web FTP client that lets you look at the file structure of your website and we just need to make sure that the .htaccess file is there. If it is not we may need to reupload it. (We can get it out of a fresh download of Omeka).

Does that sound right John?

Bonnie, I should also add that if they can help you figure out what your ftp credentials are (ftp stands for file transfer protocol and is what will let us look at the files in your Omeka installation) if you email me those credentials there is a good chance I can make a quick fix to your site and we can get this working for you.

Omeka folks: for reference Bluehost does the one click install via simplescripts. Since Bonnie did nothing particularly peculiar, just told it to install, there is a good chance that this could be a general problem with the simplescripts install or at least bluehosts usage of simplescripts.

Thanks for the help guys! I do believe we figured this out.

For reference, It was indeed as John suggested an .htaccess issue. It looks like Bluehost let Bonnie install Omeka over an installation of wordpress. However, when it did do that it left the Wordpress .htaccess file. Instead of creating a conflict it made the Omeka .htaccess file into .htaccess.txt. As wordpress does not have an admin directory (they call their directory wp-admin) there was no conflict with creating a .htaccess file in the admin directory.

I suppose the homepage worked because it did not need the rewrite rules in the Omeka .htaccess file.

In any event I think we are good to go. Thanks!

Great!

In case you're wondering, you can pretty much always get to the first page but no others when the .htaccess file is missing.

This is because Apache will automatically load index.php, which loads Omeka, when you go to the root of a site or folder. When you try to any other Omeka URL, you need to have those RewriteRules from the .htaccess to make it work.