Permalink Doesn’t Work – Get 404 Error

might be obvious, but did you actually update your permalinks? You dont mention that, and it is one of the steps in upgrading.

I went into settings clicked on permalinks then I unselected an option, saved, checked the option I wanted and hit save again. Between each save I looked at the .htaccess file and noticed that it was saving different rules each time I saved and had selected a different option.

Maybe I should take a screencast of this using Jing and have you take a look at it. Would that help?

I am a new wordpress user but I tried this and it worked perfectly (after a lot of frustration).

The .htaccess file is an invisible file – so first you have to find some kind of FTP program that will show you invisible files.

IF you have newly installed WordPress, there will probably be no .htaccess file (especially if, like me, you are installing it for the first time). The .htaccess file should be located in the root of the domain name (eg. https://www.yourdomainhere.com) or in the appropriate blog sub-directory (eg. https://www.yourdomainhere.com/blog).

Take the custom settings given by WordPress under the Permalinks section which are the same for everyone:

# BEGIN WordPress
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
# END WordPress

and enter these lines of code into your (hopefully not still invisible) .htaccess file – and save and upload if necessary.

HERE’s WHERE I FOUND THE PROBLEM – – when you edit the file, chances are your text editor (or whatever you used) added some kind of .txt suffix to it. In other words, you may be seeing a normally invisible file named “.htaccess” but, in reality, you have probably just saved a file called “.htaccess.txt” which wordpress can’t recognize. The fact is you just can’t see the “.txt” suffix and you have to remove it before wordpress can write to the file.

The only way I solved this was to SSH shell access into the root of my server and go through a lengthy command process to change it. I needed the help of my tech support to do it – and you might too. Basically just ask them to please check to see if the .htaccess file (located either in your root directory or otherwise as described above) has the .txt suffix attached to it or not. Have them rename it for you (because remember, you can’t necessarily see the suffix even though you can see the invisible file itself).

I’m not a windows user – but apparently, if you can save the file with quotations marks ( ” ” ) around it (eg. “.htaccess”) it will not add an invisible .txt suffix – but don’t quote me on that – I have not tested it.

Also make sure you chmods and mod_rewrite files are working first.

Hope this helps.

I am a brand new WordPress user and I am having a problem and I think this is similar, but the one and only time I posted in this forum last week I got slapped for supposedly posting in the wrong place. I have most people that can access the blog url and then I have a very few that cannot access it at all, they are getting a 404 page not found error. This blog is located in a subdomain and I only mention that if it might be an issue. the url is “https://ej.startiste.com” – if anyone has any ideas on this, I would be most appreciative, and thank you ahead of time. I did check the htaccess and it is correct.

Your blog loads fine with IE and FF. It does have a few errors. Go here to see what they are.

AFAIK, there is no way some can access and some cannot access unless those who cannot have done something wrong like old browser. When the light is on, it is on for everybody.

thank you for the link! am checking the errors now, and I know, that is why I thought it very strange that some cannot access the page at all. It is definitely active.

I’m having this exact same problem with my newly installed blog. My other blog (that I upgraded to 2.3.5 as well) is running along just fine. I even copied the .htaccess from the working one to the broken one and it still isn’t working.

Clearly mod_rewrite wasn’t working. I fixed the problem by adding:
Options +FollowSymLinks +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
into wordpress .htaccess .

Even I had similar problem,

Changed Permalink to

/index.php/%postname%/

And this ensured that Permalinks worked for me,