Permalinks problem 3.1.1 Help Please

You shouldn’t use postname alone for your permalinks (it will slow things down should you use a bunch of pages among other things).

Of course you can use the older versions. Go to https://www.ads-software.com/download/ and click on older releases.

Before that, however, you should try the usual debugging.

Do ANY fancy permalinks work? Try the YYYY/MM/DD/postName one for example.

Check your .htaccess – is it there’s and does it look right?

Turn off ALL your plugins. See if one of them are causing the issues.

Thanks for your reply Ipstenu,

Looks like I have been misinformed about the use of /%postname%/, and I would imagine millions of others too.

Ok, this morning I deactivated all plugins and re-installed 3.1.1. automatically.

Once again the site now works but ONLY in Firefox, both IE and Opera browsers return a not found, this is all beyond me but it strikes me 3.1.1 is just not stable and has a bug?

I tried the fancy permalinks as you suggested, but it made no difference in IE and Opera, in any event, I need short urls and really want to avoid ‘category’ appearing if possible.
.hta access is beyond me I’m afraid I would not know if it was right or not.

I am very patient but this is turning into a nightmare, so in the absence of a fix my question has now changed to:

What is the procedure to install an earlier version of 3.1?
I am assuming I have to do it manually via FTP, do I delete all the wp files associated with this site first, or do I only need to replace certain files.
Or can I just replace the whole lot file for file with ftp?

Your help would be much appreciated as this is not something I have attempted before and I don’t want to mess things up.

Thanks guys

Yeah, a lot of ‘SEO Experts’ messed people up saying it should be ‘postname’ :/ Read https://ottopress.com/2010/category-in-permalinks-considered-harmful/ for some nitty gritty on it.

Once again the site now works but ONLY in Firefox, both IE and Opera browsers return a not found, this is all beyond me but it strikes me 3.1.1 is just not stable and has a bug?

That doesn’t sound like 3.1.1 actually, but the THEME.

Can you share your URL? Have you tried flushing your browser cache for IE and Opera?

.hta access is beyond me I’m afraid I would not know if it was right or not.

That’s okay ?? Can you copy/paste it here? We can take a look.

Thank you so much Ipstenu I will get right on it.

BTW, yes I emptied the browsers every time I tried something different.

It appears I do not have a .hta access file for this site, I have looked all through the files for this site is there supposed to be one?

I did switch themes, I used Socrates because I know this is a good one, but it did not make any difference to the other browsers.

here is my site, this is brand new btw only launched last Sunday.
https://bestriftguide.org

Thanks for the heads-up about the so-called seo ‘experts’, as per usual they do not seem to know what they are talking about ??

Hello again,

Sorry, Here is my hta.access I tried to use cpanel, found it using ftp.

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

# END WordPress

Well done finding it ?? Yeah, you have to look for hidden files. And that IS the right one. So good!

Did you set your site up with a static front page, out of curiosity?

Also, do you have any plugins turned on? You will need to turn them off for testing.

Phew, yes I don’t dabble with ftp that often it just came to me to use that.

Yes, I always set a static homepage.

All plug ins are disabled, these are the ones that I have installed,
please advise if there are any there that may cause a prob.
Growmap Anti Spambot ,
Google XML Sitemaps,
Platinum SEO,
Missing Data Platinum SEO Pack,
PC Robots.txt
Robots Meta
SEO Slugs
Snapshot Backup
W3 Total Cache
WassUp
WP-Optimize
All in one Favicon,
cbnet Ping Optimizer

WP No Category Base, this is the one that worries me most is it ok to use?

WP No Category Base, this is the one that worries me most is it ok to use?

Yeaaah that would be the first one I’d turn off. :/

But also W3 Total Cache. Basically, when things go really weird, we tell folks to turn off ALL plugins. As painful as that is. Then, if everything works as it should, turn ’em back on one at a time.

Looks like I gotta trash this site, it still is not not working with no plugins on a reinstall.

Is it worth deleting the whole site from my server and starting again from scratch or am I going to get the same problem.

I have never had a issue with wp updates before, this one seems to have a big problem.

Before you delete it all…

Can you make a second site? Spin that up and see if the same problem happens.

Heads-up guys,

My inability to accept defeat has paid off, after checking through I noticed my home page had been reset to draft.

I have just tried my site on IE and never have I had a page load so fast with a couple of big images on it, bang! less than half a second.

I know I am a stupid **** but I never thought of that.

If you are still there Ipstenu perhaps you would just try that for me too make sure it’s ok on a different server.

It’s working fine now for me on Chrome too. So … yay! ??

Start turning plugins back on, one at a time.

@ipstenu

I would like to thank you personally very much for all your help today, and giving up your time with umpteen replies to me to help resolve this issue.

This stuff is impossible to figure out unless you properly understand what you are doing, even reading up on it doesn’t help that much if you do not understand how the system works.

Without you guys 99% of website owners would be stuffed.

Thanks again dude.
Take care.
Best regards
Graham.

One final thought: Code is poetry, but it is a lot easier to press a button. ?? ??

Hey, no problem! I started out where you are, and built up my skill set over the last 15-odd years of screwin’ around with websites.

But think of it this way: You didn’t learn to drive a car in one day. It all takes time. You’re doin’ great.