Switching Name of Root Directory Not Working in 1.4.2

[tonyawards]

I want to change the name of the directory that prestashop resides in: from /catalog/ to /shop/. I am still in development using lampp/127.0.0.1 on my computer and want to do it before I try to upload live. (Still using 1.4.2.5 by the way, was saving the upgrade for the next step.)

I looked at some similar solved threads and tried their suggestions, but it's not yet working for me. What I did so far:

I copied the entire contents of my /catalog/ directory into a new one, /shop/, and gave it full 777 permissions (to have a backup with the older name handy, just in case... was this a bad idea?). Both are inside lampp's htdocs directory at the same level.

Then, I changed the Preferences/PS directory to /shop/ which automatically changed the PS_BASE_URI to /shop/ in my database’s ps_configuration file. I manually checked the settings.inc.php file in my new /shop/ directory as well and made sure that define(’PS_BASE_URI‘, ‘/shop/’); was in there – - so I thought I was done.

I logged out and back in at the new URL and got into the back office with no problem, all my data and configurations are visible, but when I try to access “view my shop” I get a completely blank page at the URL of 127.0.0.1/shop/. Even if I type in the URL and add /index.php or /login.php it reverts back to the base URL and I still have an empty page.

I have reverted my settings back to /catalog/ everywhere for now and I am back into the work site, but, what could be missing here? I followed all the steps I could find in this and the other threads (I do not yet have an htaccess file generated, and my sitemap.xml is empty but this is true of all my versions here offline, working and not).

By the way, if this would matter or mess things up, the local database is the same one since it will be the db name when it's live - I'm sharing it since I made no other changes to is besides the PS_BASE_URI adjustment. This is ok, right?

Any ideas as to why this switch won’t go through to show the front office? I'm new to prestashop and fairly inexperienced with ecommerce and php, so maybe I missed something obvious.