Possible reasons for not getting permalink htaccess to work?
 

I was working on another blog on another server, trying to set up it's permalinks as I did recently with a blog, but on this server I cannot get the permalinks to work.

I upload an htaccess in ascii, chmod it to 777 to let wordpress write to it, and in options/permalinks experiment with variations of /%postname%.html. (including /index.php/%postname%.html, in the unlikely event that mod_rewrite is not installed)

But all I am getting is 404s. page not found.

It looks like wordpress is writing to the htaccess sucessfully, all the expected stuff is there. But it's not working.

Anybody have any suggestions on how to get it to work?

Anybody else ever have a similar problem?

Howe did you fix it?

bill i havent had this problem. Let me make a recommendation to post at the wordpress.org forums, or use their search function there. it seems very specific and the guys there have been very very helpful for the technical side of wordpress.

wish i could be more help than that :(

Hey Bill......this is a very helpful page from Word Press about trouble shooting permalinks. I think you'll find an answer here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

Make sure the page is there, and double check the permissions of the files and the folders

H2ohneil, I thought you might be on to something (it's usually something obvious like that when a script isn't working as expected), but upon checking it I'm not sure thats the explanation.

I checked my other working blog, on another server, and confirmed that wordpress generates permalink pages as dynamic pages that don't really exist as html pages on the server.

The script is writing the index.php to the same folder sucessfully, so I don't think it is permissions for the folder. But to test it I upgraded to permissions to 777 for a test - still no joy.

My next step is to check with the host to see if they have any conditions set for the mod_rewrite that might be blocking the htaccess function, which was suggested in the page that JenC posted.

I've tried an htaccess line change suggested by our resident tech expert cd34, but also no joy yet.

You may have Overrides turned off on that server, that would prevent .htaccess from even being loaded. Did you check to see if .htaccess is indeed being parsed at all? Perhaps put:

ErrorDocument 404 http://www.google.com/

then hit a document you know doesn't exist and see if it actually goes to google or if it is being overridden elsewhere.

mod_rewrite would return a 500 error if you have RewriteEngine on, and mod_rewrite isn't loaded... provided .htaccess is being parsed.

Can you post the rule so we can take a look? It is probably something like:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^(.+)\.html$ /index.php/$1 [L]

Its possible that your host has loaded mod_security, in which case you might need to chmod 644 the .htaccess file so that it won't be skipped.

I had similar problem with Wordpress permalinks today. I just renamed the htaccess ( to be on the safe side ), disabled permalinks, then enabled them again and it worked.

Dunno why.

Okay, I fixed that problem.

As usual, Chris provided the necessary clue. He suggested a test htaccess with a simple errordocument rule. I tried this, and realized that the server was not parsing htaccess commands at all.

So, I write host support and ask about the htaccess settings. At first they want to check the wordpress documentation, and I tell them about the errordocument test I had tried.

They check, and come back and tell me the settings were munged and allowoverride hadn't been working.

So, a simple letter to the host and the problem was fixed. I was so focused on assuming that I must be doing something simple and obvious wrong that I didn't check another obvious issue - is the host, perhaps, doing something wrong.