I put up my first blog a month ago with pretty permalinks, AOK, beautiful https://www.fredscostaricablog.com/. Now spent two days with these problems trying to put up another two of them, EXACTLY the same specs. I even copied over the good one, and it wouldn’t work. Decided the only difference was the first was in the home directory of the domain, and these two were in sub-directories (on another domain). I moved one of them to the home directory on the second domain, without change. AND IT WORKED!
That’s it! I don’t have time to set that all up and test it again.