Changing permalink structure leads to Error 500.

I’m feeling like a stupid:
– I don’t know how to create a .htaccess file (I’ve tried to do it using the Windows file explorer)
– If I mange to create it: should I place it in the blog’s directory (If I do so it will tell me that this file already exists, and I guess I should press accept to rewrite it)
– Once I’ve done that I will update those files using Filzilla
– Then I should try to enter again in the admin page (will the server error be there?)

THANKS very much for your help

Windows explorer. Ok, right-click and choose New Text File.
Highlight it and rename it to .htaccess.

FTP it up to the blog directory. 644 permissions should be fine.

After FTP’ing, verify you don’t have a “.txt” on the end of the file name — if you do, remove it.

I love you guys. My blog is back!
I guess I must forget about changing the URL structure…
Thanks again

The same thing is happening as soon as I want to change my About page, by the way.
This is getting nasty.

After you select the Name and Date structure and save, is .htaccess still empty?

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

# END WordPress

This is it.

Mmph. I don’t think your host is enabling AllowOverrides.

From an earlier post of mine in this thread:

If nothing else, try putting this in the custom field and see if it does anything: /index.php/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

(after clearing out your .htaccess again I suppose)

Hm. Is there a way of testing whether AllowOverride is enabled? I don’t know too much about it.

Making the index.php part of the URI should be the last resort.

edit:
Does anybody know of any free providers of MySQL databases everything I need for WordPress to run smoothly?
I only need the database, since my own provider (which costs around $100 a year) doesn’t properly provide that.

I’m so sick of this.

Thanks.

If you have root access to the server, you could check your httpd.conf.

Or ask your host.

I’m sure there’s something simple we could drop in your .htaccess to test as well, but I’m drawing a blank.

I’ve spoken to my host and they don’t have enable the mod-rewrite enabled. They won’t enable it and they won’t set it for me.

Change hosts.
Seriously.
If a host told me any of the above, I’d say “well, then I guess I won’t be paying you any more” and hang up.

At the moment, I run the database seperate on a different host. This may be a stupid question, but which of them needs to support AllowOverride and mod-rewrite?

Whichever box has your Apache web server on it.

Say – I never asked, what version of Apache?

Apache 2.o, if I’m not mistaken.

I’m that close to switching hosts. Any recommendations?

Now this is weird. My host just confirmed that mod_rewrite is enabled and should work just fine. What am I doing wrong? I tried chmod’ing the .htaccess to 666 without results.

Well, mod-rewrite being enabled is part 1 of 2 parts.
Do they also have AllowOverride on for you? Without that, .htaccess is rather useless.