Help – "Using a pre-existing sub-directory install" has not worked

As an update – some of the pages seem to be working and have lost the “wordpress” part of their urls. But the homepage is not working – it is still holding onto the wordpress part of its url and so is the events page.
Some pages I can get onto include news: https://www.joe-music.net/category/news/ and About Joe https://www.joe-music.net/about/about-joe/ for example.

I see the site that already exists at root with no problem. You must still have another index file in the root directory that serves the current site. Is that an index.html file?

Thank you for replying ??

The one that you are seeing currently at root is from 2012 ?? I have a current one with 2014 stuff on the home page – the blog roll from the news page link posted above for example should be on there.

I do have an index.html file in the root directory. It’s been there all the time but could it be causing a problem now?

If you have an index.html and an index.php, the index file that gets served by default is defined in the “DirectoryIndex” directive for your site configuration. In your case it looks like the .html file is being given preference. Either way, you can only serve one site at a time (one index.*. file) from root.

Is it safe to delete the index.html – is it serving any purpose? (not that I can understand how it sat there quietly enough for two years but I am a novice!) I need to serve my wordpress site from root and I have a forum which has its own subdirectory and is served from https://www.joe-music.net/forum.

Or how would I define the right index file.

You can try either renaming it or removing it if you don’t care about the site at root any longer. That might be enough to serve the index.php page instead.

Take another look at the .htaccess file in the root directory. I think that should probably initially be a copy of the one in the WordPress directory.

That might get rid of the 500 config error I’m seeing on the WordPress directory. Then you can probably add your other content back in under the WordPress section once it’s working.

Thank you so much – that seems to have done the trick ??

EDIT: Just seen your next post. All the pages seem to be working for me now. Where is the error you have seen? – maybe it was just while I was doing the changes? ….

Actually, you can probably leave it alone if you like. It’s just a variation on the redirect that’s pointed out as a convenience for frequent changes in the sub-directory. Pointing your home site’s URL to a sub-directory

Heck, if it’s working let well enough alone, I say! ??

I think I will follow that advice – and hope it doesn’t come back to bite me later ??
Thanks again for your help ??