ugh_tc

I’ve found a fix for this through my hosts help site (Dreamhost who do one click installs of WP2.0)

You have to modify your .htaccess by adding the following before the WordPress definition:

<Files .htaccess>
order allow,deny
deny from all
</Files>

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/directoryname1/(.*)$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/directoryname2/(.*)$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/failed_auth.html$
RewriteRule ^.*$ - [L]
</IfModule>

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

The very first bit should be in all your .htaccess files to prevent people from viewing the file – after that you have the RewriteCondition defining your extra directory, just rename directoryname1 to whatever your directory is; you can add more or less by using the [OR] condition (this must be at the end of the line otherwise the failed_auth won’t work).

I use this to access my password restricted statistics pages, without having to ftp in and rename the .htaccess file temporarily 🙂