Problem with Permalinks – I don’t understand what is happening

  • I am having problems getting my ‘pretty permalinks’ to work. I have gone through the instructions and what I see does not go with what I read. First it says to put .htaccess in the same folder as your index.php. But I had a big message in the top of my dashboard saying my .htaccess might be viewable if I didn’t put it in my wp-content/backup-db folder. So I put a copy there to remove that message even though there is no index.php file there.

    I put the default permalink information in both .htaccess files and tried to set my permalinks – nothing changed. I did a chmod on the files and set them 660 and tried again. The second time the copy in my wp-content/backup-db folder was changed to

    <Files ~ “.*\..*”>
    order allow,deny
    deny from all
    </Files>

    So I am confused and not sure what is happening. I am trying to get my pretty permalinks set to custom with /%category%/%postname%/

    Could someone give me the .htaccess entries I need in my .htaccess file to make this work?

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
  • Moderator James Huff

    (@macmanx)

    If WordPress cannot automatically edit the .htaccess file, it will tell you exactly what to put in it after saving. The .htaccess file should be in your blog directory (the same directory as the wp-config.php file) and its permissions should be set to 644.

    Thread Starter terry5578

    (@terry5578)

    That is what the documentation I have been following says. And I have an .htaccess file in the same folder as my wp-config.php file. But that file is not getting updated and I am not getting any messages saying WP can’t update it. Like I said – what I read is not what I see happening and I don’t know why.

    I would like to just manually load the .htaccess file but I don’t know what to put in it. I was hoping someone could give me that information.

    Moderator James Huff

    (@macmanx)

    What you put in the file may be specific to your installation. Set the permissions of .htaccess to 666 and try one more time.

    Thread Starter terry5578

    (@terry5578)

    OK – I put the default info back in the backup-db folder – changed mod settings to 666 and changed it again. This time I verified the successful permalink change message at the top of the screen. But I checked both .htaccess files and this time neither one was changed. They both still had the default info in them.

    However something has changed. My site is https://waltdisneyworld.eguidesintl.com/ – before every time I set the pretty permalinks only the home page worked – none of the secondary pages could be found. Now the secondary pages are found but nothing further. But it is at least putting the correct IP address in the address bar – just not finding pages.

    Moderator James Huff

    (@macmanx)

    Forget about the backup-db folder. The notice you saw was to put a blank .htaccess file there to protect your backups, it was not for the permalinks.

    For your permalink settings, what are you entering in Settings/Permalinks under “Common settings”, “Category base”, and “Tag base”?

    Thread Starter terry5578

    (@terry5578)

    “Common settings” – I am checking the “Custom Structure” button and putting “/%category%/%postname%/ in the field

    I am leaving the “Category base” and “Tag base” blank

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
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