For whatever reason, or maybe I just don’t know the trick yet, but Plesk demands a real domain when creating a site. I had setup an online book catalog for our owner but after testing this out using  Joomla Media Library and everything seemed to work fine, well then it stopped. The errors I was getting indicated a SOAP error. This application relies on the Amazon Web Service. I thought it might be that Amazon had changed their methods for this.

Anyway it didn’t work and I wasn’t sure this was the best way to go with this so I suggest the owner try using WordPress. I felt it would handle the functions he needed and found an WordPress plugin to allow embedding Amazon info, called Amazon Showcase WordPress Plugin and direct the user to Amazon where we are setup as an associate.

I setup up a site with an unused domain of the company so that they could populate their blog with the book data. Then it was time to change the URL pointer of this site to the new one.

In Plesk I deleted the old site and setup renamed the new site using the temporary domain name. You do that by drilling down to the domain’s property pages and in the Domain Adminstration group at the bottom left hand side is Domain Administrator Access.

In the Preferences section you can choose to rename the site. This also changes the folder name of the file on the server. So by changing the domain from originalDomain.com to newDomain.com the folder will change likewise.

I’ve done this on a number of WordPress installs already but this time the links kept refering back to the original blog.

I found this handy fix on the Codex of WordPress where you define these lines in your wp-config.php.

Note: Do not copy and paste this. I just spent some time troubleshooting the white screen of death because of the characters in this sample.

define(‘WP_HOME’,’http://example.com’);
define(‘WP_SITEURL’,’http://example.com’);

Be sure to leave off any trailing slashes. (don’t use http://example.com/)

I had this on at first and when making updates in the admin the page would return leaving the domain off and triggering site not found error. (URL looked like this http://wp-admin/yaddayadda/)