I hope someone can help me. I have a root installation of WP, but not as index.php (it's actually news.php). Consequently the_permalink() doesn't work, as the root of the website is a different page.
Is there any way I can fix this? Perhaps something in the .htaccess that detects ? in the URL and redirects to news.php/? etc.
Thanks for any assistance, I'm a newb at WP!
I don't know of any legitimate use case that exists for changing index.php.
If something else is using index.php then move WP in its own /news directory.
You could change the .htaccess but you might run into trouble down the road.
If you want to set up your site so that you have a home page that is outside your wordpress site (which is why I assume you have renamed the wordpress index.php file) the best way to set things up is to have wordpress installed in a sub directory off the root rather than in the root.
However, given you are already 'up the creek' so to speak there is another fix.
...
<?php
/*
Template Name: Home Page
*/
?>
Then save this page as homepage.php in your theme folder (/wp-content/themes/themename).
Now go into WordPress admin and create a new page, call it 'Home' or whatever you like and on the right hand side select 'Home Page' from the template drop down.
Go into the settings>reading menu in WordPress admin and change the option Front page displays option to 'A static page' and select the Home page you just created.
Finally go back and remove your old index.php file and rename the news.php file to index.php
Whammo you will now be serving up the old index page through your WordPress install, and when people hit index.php on your site they won;t see the standard WordPress home page.
