limekiller

Fixed. It dawned on me that this was a pretty permalinks problem. When I copied files from the old server to the new, I forgot to check for hidden files, so I missed getting the .htaccess file copied.

Good suggestion, but that didn’t fix it. The files look to be editable. By which I mean the “update file” button is visible. All files have 644 permissions, folders have 755. I changed akismet.php to 766, edited a comment, clicked “update file”, and it got a 404 page not found error. I go back to my plugin editor and see that my change wasn’t made. I don’t have SSH capability, so I only tried that single file. Do I need to change the folder to something else? I should reiterate that all those files in my original post have the same permissions, yet some throw the error and some don’t.

I’ve got the same problem in 2.8.1. I’m not sure if the problem was there in 2.8.0 or not. BTW, this problem only exists when trying to edit pages. Editing posts is fine.

[update: problem solved. I deactivated the wp decoratr plugin and its working now. I suggest people having trouble go through their plugins one by one.]

I found an option to do this through apache that I haven’t yet got the kinks worked out of, but it will do what I want with more flexibility than the previous procedure mentioned. I added the following to httpd.conf

<VirtualHost *:80>
    DocumentRoot /var/www/wordpress
    ServerName www.example.com
</VirtualHost>

That assigns the root folder for “servername” to “documentroot”. The kink is that the main page loads, but is missing the style sheets, and links are broken. I think that’s going to be fairly simple to fix, but I haven’t found the answer yet.

stvwlf, That looks like what I needed. I hadn’t been clear on what those options did prior to seeing the link you suggested. I thought it was going to take some Apache kung-fu to get it done.

Resolved:
The problem was that the httpd.conf file was empty. I edited it with:

<Directory /var/www/wordpress>
    Options FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride FileInfo
</Directory>

and the problem was solved.

A little more info. I added a custom 404 error document to the .htaccess file and it isn’t loading when I intentionally go to a nonexistent page. So for some reason, it appears .htaccess is being ignored.

(Note: In my forum post I mistyped and should have typed %monthnum% instead of %month%. My intention was to have something look like …/200905/postname.html rather than /2009/05/postname.html.)

Nonetheless, I tried your suggestion of putting the extra slash in, and that didn’t work either. I made a post titled “test-post” and clicked “view post” after publishing it. I get an error that says

Not Found
The requested URL /wordpress/2009/05/test-post.html was not found on this server.

I even did a fresh install on a separate computer and get the same error. I’ve verified that .htaccess is being made, and that mod-rewrite is enabled. However, no matter what non-default structure I pick, the .htaccess file is always created identically. So .htaccess is the same whether the structure is set to “/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/” or “/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/” or “/monkey/pinata/%postname%/”. I don’t understand that. It seems like .htaccess should change depending on the structure chosen. index.php is referenced in .htaccess and its not changing either. If I change back to default structure, .htaccess empties.

Is there some file that might need its permissions altered I should look at? I’m running Ubuntu 8.10, Apache2 and WordPress 2.7.1.

Nope, that doesn’t work either. That’s almost exactly what was created for me when I changed the structure. Here’s what was automatically created.

# 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

Adding the ErrorDocument line and taking out the “wordpress” references made no change. I still get a 404 error.