FYI: Permalinks issue solved at Network Solutions

  • Well, I poluted these airwaves with several postings trying to fix permalinks in my Networks Solutions’ hosted site. I joined a discussion, trying to understand how permalinks work. Later I was told by Network Solutions that they didn’t support mod_rewrite, but then I couldn’t get them to work without mod_rewrite either! I requested feedback from anyone who might have gotten them to work on a Networks Solutions hosted site. Lastly, I sent a final cry for help, trying to make permalinks work, without mod_rewrite to no avail. I gave up, destined to deal with URLs that have question marks…

    I was lucky enough to be contacted by the Director of Product Development of Network Solutions (for a different issue), and he confirmed that they do have mod_rewrite enabled. He took a personal interest in my situation and found the problem within the .htaccess file: None of the regular expressions was being executed!

    All the regular expressions begin with ^blah-blah/… but it seems that the regexp module gets strings of the form /blah-blah/… so there is no match. Substituting the ^ character to be ^/ fixed the problem!

    I don’t know why the expressions work for other people as they are output by WordPress a€?? frankly I don’t care :wink:.

    Interestingly enough, the installation at Network Solutions is such that it completely ignores the value of RewriteBase. I can set it to whatever nonsense I want, it won’t make a difference. I say this because it may be a clue as to why the strings are being passed with the initial character being a forward slash.

    Bottom line: If your permalinks don’t work, and you want to try one more thing, edit the .htaccess file that WordPress generates and replace the ^ character at the beginning of each RewriteRule to be ^/.

    Thanks to all who tried to help.

    Rafael Bracho

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  • I appreciate you taking the time to come back and post your solution. Though I haven’t had any problems with Permalinks myself, I’ve seen the large quantity of threads dealing with this issue and the large amount of frustration from regular users trying to get them to work. Hopefully this post will assist in helping others fix what has been thought to be unfixable. Thanks for sharing!

    Thank you so much for taking the time to come back and post the solution. I manually edited my .htacess file and made the changes you suggested and it worked perfectly… until I posted again and WP automatically regenerated the .htaccess file without the ^/ modification. It took me a few hours, but I realized that instead of constantly updating the file manually, I should update the file that generates it automatically.

    So in case anyone wanted the final solution, here it goes.

    Open the file wp-includes/classes.php and run a find and replace for RewriteRule ^ (making it RewriteRule ^/). In the WP 1.5.2 copy I have, there were only 3, so once you get those modified, everything should work as it should!

    My site is up and running on Network Solutions, but from time to time (quite a lot) I get the “Error establishing a database connection” error. Did you ever have this problem in your instance of Network Solutions?

    Thanks

    Thread Starter rxbracho

    (@rxbracho)

    Important Update: Network Solutions has changed their environment in such a way that the work-around is no longer needed. Standard .htaccess files work coming out of the admin interface. Unfortunately, this means (for some of us) that we must undo our fixes. Fortunately, however, it also means that it will work for everyone else.

    Rafael Bracho

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