WordPress Blog Update

I installed WordPress using XAMPP, a packaged-up version of Apache + MariaDB + PHP + Perl, which has WordPress as a plugin. I used this fairly recently for some local dev work and it seemed to work nicely.
Doing it live, here, brought some annoyances.
First, I want static site material at https://hyperdata.it/ and this blog at https://hyperdata.it/blog. This setup defaulted to https://hyperdata.it/wordpress.
Even though I have absolute admin superpowers (root) on this server, the option to change this was greyed out in wp-admin. So I followed the official guidance, as far as changing wp-config.php and functions.php. This didn’t work, even though it had changed the values in the DB.
So I employed my superpowers to add a symlink :
ln -s /opt/lampp/apps/wordpress/htdocs /opt/lampp/htdocs/blog
This (with the above) appears to have done the trick.
Featured Image
The WP Theme I’m using, ‘Coldbox’, when showing a list of posts shows the default ‘Featured Image’ associated with that post. Which would be fine, except that needs setting manually. Not something I fancy doing for all the posts I imported from the previous setup.
I tried a plugin – didn’t work, tried fiddling with a script to use the first image of a post as featured…didn’t work. Not wanting to waste any more time on this, I just replaced the image Coldbox uses if there isn’t a featured.
/opt/lampp/apps/wordpress/htdocs/wp-content/themes/coldbox/assets/img/thumb-medium.png
HTTPS
The next little annoyance I need to fix, not a WP issue, is using https:// rather than http://.
…to be continued