Giving WordPress Its Own Directory together with index.html

Question

I want to power my website from http://www.example.com and not from http://www.example.com/foldername

I've completed this task and this is working but before people actually get to the WordPress website they must pass another website-page. See the scheme below.

www.example.com: shows a page with some information and a link to navigate to the wp site.

My problem now is that when I follow the steps on http://codex.wordpress.org/Giving_WordPress_Its_Own_Directory, my index file is fighting with the one from WordPress. I hope people understand the problem.

EDIT

Changing .htaccess to:

DirectoryIndex home.htm index3.php index.htm index.html default.htm

This is working to change the homepage, but as soon you are on the WordPress website and you click on home in the menu, you get back to the homepage set in the .htaccess file.

Answer 1

Have you considered using a "splash page" instead?

See for example this tutorial:

http://wp.tutsplus.com/tutorials/how-to-make-a-splash-page-with-wordpress/

where you could use the html code from index.html in the splash screen template.

There are also plugins available to do this.

You can also check out:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Creating_a_Static_Front_Page

That way you don't have to "fight" against the wordpress setup ;-)

Answer 2

Here is the code to put in your functions.php file, it will show the splash-page.php only to outside visitors (by checking the referer). Make a splash-page.php in your current theme directory and edit the domain (example.com) in the code:

add_action('template_redirect','my_splash_page');      
function my_splash_page(){ 
    $referer = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
    $referer_parse = parse_url($referer);
    if(is_front_page()){
        // let visitors see the normal wordpress homepage if they are browsing your web
        if($referer_parse['host'] == "example.com" || $referer_parse['host'] == "www.example.com") {

        // let visitors see the splash page if they are visiting directly or from another pages
        } else {
            include(TEMPLATEPATH.'/splash-page.php');
            exit();
        }
    }
}