Future events not working, permalink flushes only making things worse

Hi!

Thank you for your message and your kind works.

If no permalink is working I’d guess that your .htaccess file isn’t being generated. Please check your file permissions and also double check if the htaccess is being created

Kind Regards,
-Roch

Hey and thanks for your reply!

Haven’t been able to fix the issue yet. File permissions and .htaccess are both areas I’m definitely not familiar with but I did do some searching on the issue and here’s where I’m at now:

– Seems like the .htaccess file indeed is not created.
– Checking my file permissions, I have my web (usually public_html but on my host it’s called web) folder set to 710. Not sure what to do with it though.
– I found this article on why the .htaccess file is not present.
– When I change my permalinks, WordPress does not show me that “If your .htaccess file were writable…” message.
– On that same article, I scrolled down to check the comments and found this comment:

It’s worth pointing out that your .htaccess file might be missing because you don’t need one. For instance the Nginx web server doesn’t use .htaccess files for security and performance reasons.

And that’s where the issue might be: I think my host uses the Nginx web server because the 404 Not found error I told you about earlier, it has the word Nginx underneath the error message.

Does this mean it’s not possible to fix the issue while using my current host?

Hi!

That’s great, it looks like you are really close to fixing the issue. We’ve isolated it to the .htaccess so you have 2 options there, 1 to manually create the file or 2, change the file permissions just to make sure that this isn’t a Nginx issue.

I’d go for 2) right now, as it’s the easiest to do, in your control panel, where you see the web folder permissions as 710, try setting it as 744, or even as 777 (just for the htaccess creation, after that you can roll back to 710).

Kind Regards,
-Roch

Thanks a lot!

Still, no luck. I tried changing the file permissions on the web folder to both 744 and 777 and then changed the permalink settings and kept getting the 404 Nginx error. I also changed the file permissions on the subfolder where the site actually is but that didn’t work either. Also, the .htaccess file wasn’t created.

I guess I should try to manually create the .htaccess file. How should I go about doing that?

Thanks for your patience!

Hi!

No worries, we still have one more thing to try (and a lot more if that doesn’t work).

Please copy this in a text file (you can create a new one as .txt just so you can edit it with notepad):

# 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

Then save / rename the file as .htaccess, make sure that the file name is exactly like that in your site’s root (so inside of that folder you mentioned).

Let’s see how it works this time!

Kind Regards,
-Roch

Thanks again, but it didn’t help. Maybe we should try something else.

Some browsing around the web revealed that this is a common issue for Nginx based servers. I found several topics on different forums on the issue: this WordPress codex and this support ticket both address the issue rather extensively.

But for me, neither are of no help. You see, I can’t find the /etc/nginx/sites-available/ folder or any other config files on my web servers, even though I have the force show hidden files option ticked on Filezilla.

Any suggestions or should I just call my web service provider for help?

Hi!

Probably these folders are blocked for you. I’d recommend you contacting your hosting provider to see if they can apply this for you.

That second link is very promising as the change seem to be easy to apply, but Nginx isn’t really my expertise so I’m not sure how to write these files there

Kind Regards,
-Roch

Hey there,

I have now contacted my service provider and apparently they did what they could with the issue. They’ve added this piece of code into the config on our domain:

location / {
            index index.php index.html index.htm;
            try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args;
        }

However, even this addition did not help. They said that usually this helps with permalinks on other users.

Is there any chance that Nginx based servers simply don’t function well with Sportspress?

Wait a minute, it’s working!

My service provider noticed that they updated the config file only on the main domain and not on the subfolder where our demo site actually is.

Everything is in order now, finally!

Thanks so much for your help, Roch! I’ve marked this topic as resolved.

That’s awesome!

I’ve learned a lot on this one as well, so thank you! ??

I’m glad it’s resolved!

Please, let us know if you need anything else.

Kind Regards,
-Roch

Hi Roch,

Unfortunately it seems that this issue has reappeared for some reason. I don’t know if this is due to recent WordPress or Sportspress updates but anyways, the issue is back.

What has changed in between, is the address of the site: https://sohosportingsociety.com/sohohc

I contacted my service provider and they’ve made all the changes they made previously but for some reason this hasn’t helped. The config file reads like this at the moment:

location /wordpress/ {
    index index.php index.html index.htm;
    try_files $uri $uri/ /wordpress/index.php?$args;
} 

Any chance you would know what’s causing the problem to resurface?