Today we moved our blogs from http://blog.spritle.com to https://www.spritle.com/blog.
Thought I would also share what steps we did to move WordPress blog to Rails (integrated WordPress) arena.
Background:
http://www.ourdomain.com is running on Ruby on Rails application with Phusion Passenger/mod-rails/Apache2
http://blog.ourdomain.com was running on WordPress
Now we want to move our blogs from http://blog.ourdomain.com to http://www.ourdomain.com/blogs
The problem you might face if you simply copy or symbolic link your wordpress installation directory ‘/blogs‘ to ROR ‘-railsapps-/public/’ folder is ‘Page not found’ or ‘No Route information found’.
To avoid this problem (and also to run any other Java/Php apps like magnolia, drupal, svnmanager etc inside ROR), you simply have to tell Apache that ‘Turn off passenger’ for those particular directories. This is also called as per-directory options in Apache terms.
That would be like..
[source language=”xml”]
PassengerEnabled off
[/source]
If you then restart your apache, you can directly access your blogs from http://www.ourdomain.com/blogs/
Now a little more step is required to complete the process neatly.
What about your old blog address, that is http://blog.ourdomain.com ?
You can’t simply crap it as it may affect your hard-earned SEO values. Your visitors would also lose their bookmarks of your blogs.
The solution is simple: Go to your virtual host settings and add a permanent redirect instruction.
That would be like..
[source language=”xml”]RedirectPermanent / “http://www.foo.com/blogs/”[/source]
Hope that helps and if you know any other shortcut, please let us know.
By the way, if you are using mongrel as your rails engine server then the steps to integration would vary a little. You may have to play around with apache ReWrite mode stuff and so on.
Sometimes it’s really that simple, isn’t it? I feel a little stupid for not thinking of this myself/earlier, though.