Broken permalinks- help!
Published August 12th, 2007 in Blogging.I apologize for any trouble anyone might have had today trying to get to something in the archives. My permalinks have suddenly stopped working, and I have no idea why.
I have had them set up as follows: /archives/%postname%/ almost since I began the blog in January, and they have worked fine. I was barely even in the WP Admin this weekend and haven’t done a thing in ages except write posts and manage comments (no new plugins, upgrades, etc.), and suddenly I get the system 404 (not the 404 page from my template) when clicking on any permalink. I tried changing them to the default, and they work fine, and then changed them to date and name based and that works fine as well, but any permalink structure that begins with /archive/ returns a 404. I tried deleting the htaccess and changing them again, but that did not help.
I talked to my host and their only suggestion was to set the site back to the backup version from Saturday, since I really think they were working then. I appreciated John letting me know about this, by the way. I would have been blissfully unaware until at least Monday.
Is there anyone who knows more about this kind of thing than me who might have a suggestion?
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Looks like you have ‘em working now?
Oftentimes, just revisiting Options -> Permalinks and “re-saving” your existing structure fixes things up. Especially if your .htaccess file got clobbered or hosed up for some reason.
Yes, I tried that several different times, different ways. Just tried it again for good measure, but no good. Thanks for the suggestion though.
Oh… also I didn’t get them fixed by the way- I just changed them to something that works so that people can leave comments.
That happened to me when I changed my htaccess file to block hotlinking. I had to remove those lines for it to work again properly. I doubt that helps you but I thought I’d share.
Sorry Randa, this isn’t really my forté. I feel your pain though, and I hope you get it sussed out as soon as possible.
Out of curiousity, are you happy that you chose archives/postname/ as your permalink? It’s quite a big decision to make right at the beginning of a blog’s life.
Ah the joy of Ajax Edit Comments.
Becca - thanks for that info. I really thought blowing away my htaccess would fix it, but no luck.
You’re right David, it is a big decision and when you start a blog you have no idea for the most part. I am glad I have the post name in the permalink at least. Otherwise, I don’t know what I would have chosen if I could go back. I haven’t worried about it, since I can’t change it, presuming this current issue gets sorted out.
There is a plugin you can use to change the structure of your permalink. When I started out I left the links as their defaults - I didn’t know you could change them. A few months a go I found Deans permalink migration which allows you to change the structure without breaking you old links. It worked Ok for me.
Oh! Thanks Tara, I might try that. Did you find that there were any drawbacks to installing it. Sounds like the perfect solution.
Do you have anything else in your .htaccess file? (eg. code for blocking certain visitors, rewriting domains etc.)
If so, the order in which you put things can have an impact. Try them out in different orders perhaps? (WP is usually supposed to be at the bottom)
All worked fine for me but you might want to try it out on a test site first.
@Michael - no, and in fact, I have deleted my htaccess file several times in this process to no avail.
@Tara - I just tried the plugin and it didn’t work for me. Somehow my site has decided it hates anything starting with /archives/. Everything else works! I don’t get it! Cool plugin though.
This really seems to me like a host level problem, not a wordpress problem. I don’t know what they possibly could have done though, and all my other sites work fine, some of which have the permalinks starting with /archives/
It seems that there’s a misconfiguration on your host (like you already pointed out), because every page starting with /archives/ gives other 404 error page containing ads [1], it isn’t the one that WordPress uses [2]
[1] http://randaclay.com/archives/foo/
[2] http://randaclay.com/foo/foo/
Another update, I put in a manual, single post redirect into the htaccess, and it did work:
redirect 301 /archives/4-reasons-your-blog-needs-a-logo http://randaclay.com/blogging/4-reasons-your-blog-needs-a-logo
Maybe instead of using a plugin, I need to just set up something similar in htaccess that would take care of all of them at once, but I don’t know what that code would look like… Anyone??? I just need a wildcard kind of thing right? Something like:
redirect 301 /archives/* http://randaclay.com/blogging/*