All files are safely back where they belong now - and copied to a safe location. The reason the site upgrade went a bit haywire is that a few weeks ago I discovered how to use the WordPress pages feature to make the blog into more of a complete website, and I created some new templates that were in the folder that I should not have deleted. When WordPress released Strayhorn the announcement said that you could

Manage More Than Your Blog
Another thing we observed and heard was that you wanted to use the elegant WordPress interface to manage more of your content than just your blog. …sometimes you don’t want a template or another post—you want a page. In 1.5 we added the “pages” feature which allows you to run your entire site through WordPress, if you want. For example, you could create a page called “About” and it would be automatically added to your sidebar and the link would be example.com/about/ and then you could create a sub-page of that called “My Dog” which would live at /about/my-dog/. You can have two pages or a thousand, manage your blog and a few photo pages or an entire corporate intranet 20 levels deep.

This was fine with me, but there were a couple of problems with having “a thousand pages” because when I tried creating a few I quickly saw that the links to them all appeared in the links list. I didn’t want to create a bunch of pages and have them all indexed on every page of the blog. So I gave up that plan - until I happened to run across a page in the online manual.

The documentation that is available in the manual is a most valuable resource for me. There is enough information that even with my limited knowledge of PHP, I can begin to take control of the script and get it to do a few things the way I want them done. I ran into a reference to a page called Exclude Pages from List and I found out where the function call to display pages was located and how to write an exclusion parameter into it so that certain pages would not be displayed - and neither would the child pages if there were any of those. Bingo! Now I could create any number of pages that would remain hidden until I set up a link to them in a manner of my own choosing.

Since Borderland displays the page links in a header nav bar, I created page called Links, and I’m using it to link to other pages both internal and external to the site. All of the “hidden” pages are children of a page that I am keeping blank, to use as placeholder in the URL. I call it “pages” to be absolutely generic about the whole thing. If you want to get even more fancy, you can read How to make your own page templates: and customize the new pages.

To demonstrate, you can look at the Links page and see that I have begun a list. As an example, I have a page called Photos that is at photos with a different page design. I’ve made a couple of other page templates as well, but they aren’t being used yet. Other plans to unify the design include tweaking the TrueNorth CSS to resemble Borderland’s.

Update: My subsequent attempt to install gallery software and integrate into WordPress has not quite worked the way I intended. The link to the photos page will not be using a wordpress template at this time. The gallery will remain, and I’ll have to work on making it fit.

This may all be of little interest to most people, but for me it was the answer to a question that I had asked several months ago. I just needed to know where to look for the answers. I believe that the WordPress features and the documentation in the Online Manual make it a great tool for online publishing. And I have (I think) learned my lesson about backing up files that I spent time writing.