Permalinks on Wordpress

If you’re serious about blogging with Wordpress, Permalinks are important. They change your blog sub-urls from how it’s shipped (something like ?p=3 ) to much prettier stuff, the format of which, you choose. Wordpress themselves wrote about it here, but some people feel it’s not simple enough. You must have an apache webserver for this to work.

When you get to the permalinks page, it all looks simple. Choose one of the options in the list, they are often the easiest, and personally, I think the /year/month/day/postname one is good. That’s all good. The category and tag archives should be ok, don’t worry about them for simplicity. Choose one of the filled in options, then click submits.

But what’s this? It says you should update your .htaccess now? Well, I’d better run you through that now, hadn’t I. Scroll to the bottom of the page, you’ll find code like this:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
Copy that. Next up, fire up Notepad, or some sort of basic text editor. Notepad is good for Windows, and the plain text editor in Linux is fine. Paste the code in. Now save it as 1.htaccess.

Now, fire up FTP. Check that you’ve not already got a .htaccess file in your root directory, like public_html, and if there is, scroll down. I’m assuming there isn’t. Just upload the 1.htaccess file in there, good and simple, and rename it to just .htaccess.

Now head over to your blog, and click a link. If it loads, you’ve done it right. If not, something’s wrong.

If there is already a .htaccess file in your root directory, then download it, and open it with notepad. Paste it’s contents above the code above on the 1.htaccess file we just made, and you’re good to go. Follow the instructions above.

If it’s not working, follow the process again, and if it’s still not working, then it’s possible that Mod_Rewrite isn’t working or active. Ask your host about this.