Changing the pointer in Joomla to go to other than index.php

We have a Joomla installation sitting in the same exact root folder as the client's old system, which is html-based. As it happens, the server will jump on "index.php" before it will look at "index.html" so it works out well as far as ease of deployment. The problem is that we've had to take it down to make some tweaks, and the way I did that was to just rename the file "_index.php". That way, we can still look at it, by putting a "_" in front of the filename and going directly at it, but we have to do that every time we hit a menu item, which is annoying.

Is there a way to tell Joomla that the main filename is "_index.php" (or 开发者_StackOverflow中文版something else, for that matter) instead of "index.php"? This way we can test all we want, without having to add the "_" by hand every time we render a page.

I had a similar problem to solve while replacing my joomla site with wordpress. I installed Wordpress to a subfolder , renamed the original index.php from joomla in the webroot and copied wordpress's index.php(you have to modify it accordingly) and .htacces to the root and added these rewrite rules to .htaccess:

Options +FollowSymLinks
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index.php/(.*)$ younameit.php/$1 [L,R=301]
</IfModule>

You should be able to accomplish this by editing the htaccess.txt to redirect to the renamed _index.php. Sometimes it is renamed to .htaccess , it all depends on the web host configuration.

It sounds like you could benefit from a development version of your joomla site for testing so that you don't need to make these live tweaks to your publicly accessible site. Have you considered putting the Joomla installation under source control?