I'm again prepping to take our WP/Atahualpa site "live" -- it's been running in the /www.Hatchtown.com/wp/ subdirectory while our old site has been out front at /www.Hatchtown.com/index.html. I guess what I'm going to do is to make the WP file index.php what visitors load when they come to the site. If anyone has any hints, thoughts or suggestions about this whole process I'll greatly appreciate hearing them!!

Anyway, one of the instruction steps reads:

7. Copy the index.php and .htaccess files from the WordPress directory into the root directory of your site (Blog address).

There is NO .htaccess file in my /wp/ directory OR any of its sub-directories.

I did a search and found 12 .htaccess files Ten of them are in various /Zencart/ directories -- I haven't even activated the Zencart plugin so am fairly sure that none of those .htaccess files are of interest at this point.

The other two instances of .htaccess are in the /_db_backups/ and /stats/ subdirectories of the main directory. The one in /stats/ has not been modified since 1/22/2009 while the one in /_db_backups/ was modified more recently on 3/11/2009.

Which .htaccess should I be copying into the root directory -- oh, and I just noticed that it says "copy" and not "move" -- I'm glad of that! I'm pretty sure I was going to move it. whew!

You aren't using permalinks ( your URLs end like ?page_id=3 instead of /our-coopworth-sheep/ ). The .htaccess file is usually created by Wordpress once you choose something different than "Default" at Site Admin -> Settings -> Permalinks

okay, so you're saying that I don't need to copy ANY .htaccess file into the root directory?

Yes, you should not need to copy the htaccess file since you have none.

Okay! Thank you!

The WP/Atahualpa site is now live online at www.hatchtown.com and the old html/table-based monster is retired.

What happens if I now implement pretty permalinks? Will that break the static page menu structure and blog post links that we've established?

Which pretty permalink do you recommend?

Sidenote: I had not anticipated that while we now view the w/site at hatchtown.com, we still log in to the WP Dashboard at the same hatchtown.com/wp/ subdirectory. But, it makes sense, the WP files/installation did not move.

Thank you again AGAIN!