On the face of it pretty permalink settings should work without any resort to .htaccess or overly complex ‘server’ fact finding. They are just addresses & the web has used addresses long before WP.
Alas, it can’t. You MUST have .htaccess in order to parse things correctly. It’s just how servers work right now. One day this may change. Not today.
You see these ‘addresses’ (URLs actually) are virtual. There is no page for http://example.com/2011/01/14/hello-world any more than there is one for http://example.com/?p=1 The magic is that the index.php file in WordPress’s code says ‘Aha! P=1 means he wants the FIRST post! I’ll go get that from my database!’ And the magic of .htaccess is that it says ‘Ah! 2011/01/14/hello-world is the same as p=1! I’ll tell WordPress that! He’ll know what to do!’
It’s insanely cool and I’ve totally over simplified it. But basically because it’s all virtual, it needs extra tricks to work. Can’t pull a rabbit out of your hat if you don’t have a hat.
I have tried to create .htaccess as per instructions.
Creating a .htaccess file may cause you a few problems if you’re inexperienced with webhosting. Writing the file is easy, you just need enter the appropriate code into a text editor (like notepad). You may run into problems with saving the file. Because .htaccess is a strange file name (the file actually has no name but a 8 letter file extension) it may not be accepted on certain systems (e.g. Windows 3.1). With most operating systems, though, all you need to do is to save the file by entering the name as:
“.htaccess”
(including the quotes). If this doesn’t work, you will need to name it something else (e.g. htaccess.txt) and then upload it to the server. Once you have uploaded the file you can then rename it using an FTP program.
And some real basic stuff, if you are on a windows (IIS) host, or some other host besides linux, they don’t use .htaccess files, so the instructions don’t apply
And if you don’t have mod.rewrite turned on on your server, they won’t work
See how it gets complicated quickly.
Dear WordPress Experts & Newcomers,
I am very happy to report that Pretty Permalinks are now working splendidly on my site.
There does seem to be a whole lot of confusion about this subject & for what it is worth I will share how I fixed it.
As you can see I tried faffing with .htaccess & other wierd files to no avail. In the end I contacted my hosting company and they indicated that if I changed to a Linux server all would be well.
So I did. Not only was it cheaper they also issued me a full refund on the old Windows based server pack! I had a little migration work to do but it was clearly explained and sign-posted. Time-consuming in a transcendently good way.
And after all that work I changed the permalinks via WP panel and they worked smoothly.
So to sum up. If permalinks do not work consider your hosting service and change to Linux. They will then work as intended. I hope this helps and saves you some time in the future.
All the best,
Peter
