A Basic Permalinks Question

One reason would be that using /index.php/just isn’t as nice looking as the .htaccess route. In addition .htaccess is useful for people trying to mirror url structures from other software such as movable type.

Makes it one word longer, but it doesn’t seem less nice looking to me. If people are accustomed to typing /domain/archives/2004/03/10/ I suppose the necessity of putting index.php/ in the string might confuse them. But how many people actually type URI’s? My motivation to use permalink structure is the theory it’s good SEO. I was concerned whether the WP script that renders the “nice” URI after index.php (or apparently any other filename) is unreliable compared to mod_rewrite. The permalink options page only says WP will “attempt” to pass the arguments. Looks to me like it works as well as mod_rewrite. Any reason to think it doesn’t? Or any situations where it wouldn’t?

Ah, I see at https://www.ads-software.com/support/3/6778 that it zonks the RSS links in WP 1.2. Fixed in beta, though.

the permalinks options page says that if you start your permalink structure with /index.php/ then you can ignore mod_rewrite. I tried this and didn’t touch htaccess and the permalinks seem to work fine.

I have never been able to use the pseudo-permalinks as described above. Even with the current version of CVS (1.3-alpha) it does not work. It says “updated successfully” when I copy and paste the example line, but none of the links work (they return 404 errors). Any ideas why this is happening?

The first time I did it, my text editor automatically appended .txt without telling me, and I didn’t notice that I had .htaccess.txt instead of .htaccess. That resulted in 404’s. When I renamed it to just .htaccess, it worked fine. Also, .htaccess has to be in the blog root directory (or above, IIRC, but definitely not below). After pasting, I had to trim some spaces off the end of the text (but after the last line carriage return) in the .htaccess file, don’t know if that matters, though. Be sure you have the leading “dot” in the filename: .htaccess. Beyond all that, there could be a problem with your apache configuration. I can’t help there.

You’re missing the point harpshot. I want to use the permalink structure that does not require the .htaccess, simply because my web host does not support mod_rewrite (though I asked them once before and they have plans to implement it).

For the non-htaccess method to work, your server must have PHP set to append path info– and this is not always the case. If it doesn’t, that method fails. Not sure if this can be set by the local user or not…