The forum has taken over

[Nick]

When we started The BackcountryPost Community in January, we figured it would be a while before it was ready to stand on its own as the main content of backcountrypost.com. The plan was to leave my blog on the home page as it has been the primary source of traffic, but eventually move it to it's own section and have the forum take over as the main content.

I figured it would be at least a few months, if not a year or more. But I'm very happy to say that the time has come after just over a month of opening the forum. From now on, you can access the main page of the forum by simply visiting backcountrypost.com. To visit my blog, you can click on the "BackcountryPost Blog" in the navigation bar at the top of each page or just type backcountrypost.com/blog into your browser. I'm debating killing the blog entirely but for now that's where it will be.

So if you ever want to recommend the site to someone you meet on the trail or something, you no longer have to direct them to /forum, just backcountrypost.com.

 

[Tyler]

Very nice Nick. I think it's a matter of time before it becomes more popular than that one site that has a name that doesn't seem to jive at all with anything outdoor-related, nor does it feature bunny killing.

Love the forum and glad to be able to get/share info.

 

[Nick]

Aww crap... I guess I jumped the gun on this. I thought I had the redirects all in place so that the old blog links would go to the right place and the forward to the forum would work but I was wrong. Had to revert back to backcountrypost.com going to the blog for the moment. Hope to have it fixed sometime tomorrow and then what I said above will be true again.

 

[Bill]

I figured we might get 100 members come late spring once people started looking for into for their summer trips.....

 

[Nick]

I know it's a long shot, but maybe someone here knows some .htaccess magic or knows someone that does. I am almost to the point of beating my head against the wall trying to make this work.

I have the following code in my htaccess file which is making my blog links redirect perfectly.

I need to add to this code a redirect for requests to the site root (backcountrypost.com) to forward to /forum. I've tried every variation I can find to do that but they all break the redirects below. Anyone?

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

 

[kris247]

I was a UNIX admin in a former life. I'll do a little research and see what I can figure out. I probably won't have a chance until tomorrow morning though.

 

[Nick]

Awesome. Any help would be much appreciated. Here's a more detailed rundown of the situation.

I setup my blog install so that it is accessed from /blog but the core files still reside in the root. In the process I had to change the link structure. Wordpress added what it needed to to my .htaccess and it is working great so I won't lose any search rankings and people will still get to where they want to go.

My old blog links looked like this:

http://backcountrypost.com/?p=1702

And my new links look like this:

http://backcountrypost.com/blog/vermilion-cliffs/coyote-buttes-north-january-2012/

That all goes off without a hitch until I do anything to forward backcountrypost.com to backcountrypost.com/forum. I've tried adding code to htaccess and I have also tried creating a simple index.php redirect in the root. Either way breaks the old links from forwarding to the new links. The new links still work, it just won't forward the old links to the new links which is pretty important as that is still a major source of traffic.

I could just move the forum install into the root but I would still run into the problem of having the forums htaccess jiving with the blogs htaccess. Probably even more complicated than what I'm already having issues with.

Thanks for looking into it. I think I'm going to have nightmares about this tonight.

 

[Nick]

Okay. I mean it this time! The forum is now the main landing page for anyone who visits backcountrypost.com. No need to change your bookmarks or anything but if you're just typing it in, you only need to type backcountrypost.com and you'll end up right here in the forum from now on.

All of the old links to the blog are now fixed and forwarding so we'll retain all of the search rankings from the blog site. Great for recruiting new members! Sadly, all of my Facebook Comments and Likes for each individual blog trip report died in the change.