Rewrite rules messed up after page edit

I’ve done some more DB digging and found two other rows in the options table: page_attachment_uris and page_uris. They’re in the same format as rewrite_rules, but a lot shorter. As said before, I’m pretty confident that WP uses all that gibberish to contruct regular expressions with which in turn will yield the requested post/page/whatever (so long as those rewrite rules aren’t messed up). What those page_attachment_uris and page_uris tables do exactly, I’m not sure, as the same information already seems to be in the rewrite_rules row.

What I still haven’t figured out is what exactly goes wrong, other than the fact that those rewrite rules get screwed on every page edit.

I’ve also begun going through the core of WP, to find out what exactly it does when writing/editing pages and where it could go wrong, but it’s fairly more complex than any PHP code I’ve ever written and it takes some time to even make heads or tails of it.

So, any help would still be very, very welcome, because as it looks now, I don’t think I’m going to find the problem myself anytime soon, let alone fix it.

P.S. Perhaps the output of phpinfo() could be useful to anyone looking at this problem.

I’m not sure, but I think it has to do with the fact that my WP files are in another directory than the index.php file (index.php is in the site root, WP files are in /wp).

I noticed that when I post an article in my blog, “Site admin” links, “Edit post/comment” links and the likes point to /wp-admin/ whereas they should point to /wp/wp-admin/.

So if WP indeed thinks that its files are in the siteroot when posting, it kinda figures that it messes up those rewrite rules when posting/editing a page, becase it seems only then it recreates them.

Am I making any sense? Is anyone reading this at all? I’d still appreciate some help here…

hey…i’ve been reading, but unfortunately have no clue either. I’m experiencing the same problem although my WP install is in the site root. Posts work fine, just not pages (except for Archives). The most frustrating thing is i’m running several sites on WP and only one of them has this problem.

After hours of reading and researching to try and fix this I still can’t get it working. I think it’s definitely a mod-rewrite issue.

*sad*

Hi Dreamshop

Well, at least it’s good to know I’m not the only one with this problem. Then again, makes it all the more curious why I just can’t seem to find anything about it. Tried these forums, tried Google, nothing.

I could perhaps accept it if it was only me, but if you have the same problem, it stands to reason we’re not the only ones. So why can’t I just find anyting?

the really annoying part is that the WP docs state that with permalinks the htaccess should be updated whenever you add a new page…but there’s NO explanation about what formula these should be in if you have to add them manually.

i’ve tried numerous things such as deactivating all plugins, using default ‘ugly’ links etc. I still get a 404 error for all pages, both old and any new ones I try to add.

Also…I’ve noted that you mention a rewrite rule in the wp_options database table but I can’t don’t see this in any of my installs?

WordPress has changed the way it handles request recently. In WP 1.5, all rewrite rules were stored in the .htaccess file. WP 2.2 (I’m not exactly sure when they changed this) has a simple rewrite rule in its .htaccess file that rewrites every request to a non-existing physical file to index.php, and then uses the rewrite rules from the database to determine what to do with the request.

So when anyone requests a page from your site, Apache will try to find a physical file matching the request, and if it can’t, it rewrites the request to WP’s index.php, and WP uses the original request URI (which it gets from Apache) to try to find any matches, and if it can’t, it’ll throw a 404 at you.

So these rewrite rules in the database are for some reason messed up when posting or editing a page, causing WP to be unable to find any match for any request whatsoever, and thus always spits out a 404.

I’m not exatly sure why WP still tries to recontruct the .htaccess file everytime I post or edit a page, because since all those rewrite rules are now in the database, it is no longer nessecary.

well i still have this problem…my next step is to setup a copy of the site with a fresh install on a different hosting account. i’m wondering if it just comes down too WP not playing nice with the host apache or php setup.

one other thing this install uses is Gallery2. so it could be that.

still testing.

I’m going to move to another host soon, too. Going to do a fresh install, and I hope I’m rid of this problem then.

I had this exact same problem as well… I lived on backups for a couple months and couldn’t get it to work.

Then I did some hacking and figured it out. First I added the plugin:

function fix_slash($string, $type) {
  global $wp_rewrite;
  if ($wp_rewrite->use_trailing_slashes==false && $type != 'single')
    return trailingslashit($string);
  return $string;
}

add_filter('user_trailingslashit', 'fix_slash', 66, 2 );

that is a bit of a custom job from this forum, but it works at adding a trailing slash to links…

Now whenever I want to edit a page I backup my sql, then I have to go edit /wp-includes/rewrite.php specifically

function get_category_permastruct() {
		if (isset($this->category_structure)) {
			return $this->category_structure;
		}

		if (empty($this->permalink_structure)) {
			$this->category_structure = '';
			return false;
		}

		//if (empty($this->category_base))
			//$this->category_structure = $this->front . 'category/';
		//else
			$this->category_structure = '/';

		$this->category_structure .= '%category%';

		return $this->category_structure;
	}

I just have to uncomment those 3 lines and it works perfect. BTW, I recommend DreamHost

Unnfortunately, that doesn’t work for me either. But my domain will be transferred to my new webhost within a few days, so I hope a fresh WP installation there will fix this…

okay….so after doing a huge amount of testing I decided to try a different theme template and that fixed it. (DUH) So my problem was caused by some bad code in the design template. Turns out the developer isn’t updating that template anymore so I’ve switched to another.

Well, doesn’t work for me since I already tried with the default theme on a completely fresh install. I think I can assume that at least that one should work fine.

Marked the topic as resolved. Since I moved to a new web host, I have no more problems.