QNAP: WordPress Themes Not Displaying Error

So far I have been successful in exporting and importing my Blogger/Blogspot content to WordPress self-hosted. The nice thing to note is that this functionality is now built-in to WordPress and it will work after the initial authentication. After which I used the Category to Tags Coverter plugin which nicely sorted through the various import mismatch. Voila!

There is however one nasty issue. Although my newly converted Blogger-to-WordPress blog displays correctly in my internal network the view from the outside looking-in (external viewers) is largely flawed, to say the least. The WordPress themes, no matter what I change them to, are broken!

I found out the hard way and ticking off several theories.

1. Theme error?

I switched to the most basic theme and to my preferred ones, no game.

2. WordPress file and folder permissions?

Not sure what was up I re-installed several times and even updated to the latest 3.0.1 (which is another horror story altogether for another time). Still no juice, but that doesn't mean it isn't a particular file/folder permission setting.

3. Apache webserver and .htaccess rules?

I disabled, commented-out, deleted, created several .htaccess files in various folders but to no avail. It could be a general error under the main rules file that prevents serving images under the WordPress subfolder and yet why does it allow images on my phpBB and Joomla sites?

This is a mystery that needs to be solved and damn if I don't figure it out, soon.

For now I'm going through the official WordPress Codex notes on changing file permissions.

Update: 2010/November/22 @ 1:09AM

After ranting to my friends over dinner and swearing to move onto Joomla!, I simmered down and re-forwarded all my domains back to BlogSpot temporarily. After which I re-read the Codex and read through changing the site URL portion. The shortest path for me without messing with too many entries was to use the Relocate method, and it works. Eureka!

Here is how to do it:

1. Switch to editing mode (or followed the first 3 steps from my previous post)

2. Edit the wp-config.php file

3. Go to the end of the file and add the new temporary line:

define('RELOCATE',true);

4. Open your browser to your apparently-broken-to-external-wordpress-page and log-in:

ex. http://my-broken-wordpress-page.com/wordpress/wp-login.php

5. Log-in as normal

Since the RELOCATE flag set to true, your siteurl (General Settings -> WordPress address) will be auto-magically updated to whatever path you used to access the log-in screen. This will generally get the admin section functional but will not necessarily fix all the sections of your setup. You'll have to go through the rest of the blog and comb through the kinks if you find them. For now, my external viewers can now see this blog in its intended glory. Hooah!

Security tip:
Remove the added line once you get your site up and running. Leaving it there may break it (or leave your WordPress blog open to one).