WordPress’ .htaccess File Is Genius

Discussion

1. Eric Wendelin

   I have been playing around with this in WordPress, and the only problem I am still having is that the “Next Page” link at the bottom of some pages does not work correctly. The link goes to http://domain.com/page/2/ and is supposed to use mod_rewrite to go to ./index.php?page=2 but all attempts I make to resolve this have not helped.

   I am currently trying something like:

   "RewriteRule ^/page/(\d+)/? /index.php?page=$1"
   

   What say you? Thanks for your help.
2. Marco Richter

   Eric, do you use WordPress 2.3 + the “Permanent Redirect”-Plugin?
   I did and came upon the exact same problem. Deactivating the plugin solved this, WP2.3 will do for you with their canonical URLs now.
3. david

   @Eric:

   Odd, my “next page” functionality has always worked so I can’t image what the issue is. Is your regular expression working correctly?

   @Marco:

   Thanks for contributing!
4. Eric Wendelin

   Yes, actually turning off permalinks solves the problem. I was really hoping to figure this out so I don’t have ?p=4 stuff.

   I don’t think my regex is working. Maybe I will try to make it more general (like \w+/page/(\d+)/?). Do I need the ^ and $ in my regex or will it be more flexible (albeit less secure)?
• peter parker

  hi in my wordpress dashboar display meassage “Please make sure your .htaccess file is writeable ” what is this meaning?
5. Brad Harris

   Setting up RewriteRules like this to push everything through one file, and processing it according to the structure of the url is a pretty common practice in most mvc frameworks. Its great for seo, and great for developing a clean mvc based site.
6. david

   Thanks for commenting Brad.

   I’m aware that setting up RewriteRules is the way to do things, but WordPress’ .htaccess file is so simple.

   I’d post RewriteRules I’ve written to do the same function (MVC) but I’m too embarrassed!
7. AskApache

   Heres a couple .htaccess code snippets I use to tweak wordpress..

   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^[^\.]+\.html/$
   RewriteRule ^(.*)\.html.*$ http://www.askapache.com/$1.html [R=301,L]
   
   RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /(feed|wp-atom|wp-feed|wp-rss|wp-rdf|wp-commentsrss)(.*)\ HTTP/ [NC,OR]
   RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^feed [NC]
   RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^(FeedBurner|FeedValidator|talkr) [NC]
   RewriteRule .* http://feeds.askapache.com/apache/htaccess? [R=307,L]
   

   And I use a ton of RedirectMatch’s
8. chirag

   Hai David

   Can you help? how to .httaccess in Local pc ??

   i am using wamp server
9. Josh

   As Brad said, this is a pretty stock-standard .htaccess file. I know that CakePHP uses exactly the same (possibly minus the RewriteBase directive) and a number of other CMSs and frameworks do also. This set of rules is all most sites need to be able to support pretty URLs and a sensible code structure.

   So yes, WP’s .htaccess is elegant in its simplicity, but it’s hardly alone!
10. AntonioCS

    chirag: If you have AllowOverride All in you httpd.conf file then you can place the .htaccess file in the same folder you have your index.php.
    If not you either set the AllowOverride to All (Note: There might be another option to just allow the .htaccess file to work but I normally have it set to All) or add the changes in the httpd.conf

    Nice article david. I too use those lines to redirect everything to index.php in my php mvc framework :)
    Never really knew exactly what “RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f” and
    “RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d” really meant.
    Thanks for clearing that up!
11. Brandon Hansen

    Do you know what it passes back to the server?
12. Ramon Fincken

    @Brandon Hansen: take a look at $_SERVER[‘REQUEST_URI’] and the query.php file near all is_home etc…
13. ghprod

    yes, no doubtful…mens behind WP are genius!!!

    anyway, any tutorial how to proccesing request url in wordpress, i mean in index.php?

    regards
14. nirok

    I’ve been trying to find an answer everywhere for this but how do you get the reply box on the comments like you have here?
15. Jonathan

    Hi,

    You look like a htaccess knowledgeable person, I have a riddle for you:

    So we’ve installed WordPress into our /blogs/ folder.

    We had an old store in the /store/ folder.

    We upgraded to WP E-Commerce and now it’s in /blogs/store/

    We want to make all the old links that go to /store/ load the new store.

    I’ve tried this but it does not work:

    RewriteRule ^store/ /blogs/store/

    or

    RewriteRule ^store /blogs/?p=123

    if 123 is the page id of store.
• Micheal Steven

  I am so poor of WordPress. I just start to learnt it 3 hours ago and now I got one problem.

  I can change Permalink to make it as a friendly URL but when I access to thoese page I got the error message that not found my pages.

  Does anyone knew about this problem, please give some guide to me.

  Thank.
• Mia

  Just refresh the page, clear the cache and then follow the links from the home page. This is probably not anything to do with .htaccess
16. mark shirley

    Can anyone tell me were my htaccess file is in wordpress 3.0 im getting error 500 warnings and need to add some code to it in 1&1 hosting
17. Herb

    This is beyond frustrating. None of the .htaccess examples work, and killing my root .htaccess is simply not an option. :-/
18. Jessica

    OMG Thankyou! Sometimes I get htaccess issues on my sites, and the only way to fix it is to use these examples, this saved me having to get another clean example from one of my other websites! Thanks
19. Tony B

    David, I’m getting an error in WP, running 3.3.1 that says:
    Your backup folder MIGHT be visible to the public. To correct this issue, move the .htaccess file from wp-content/plugins/wp-dbmanager to /home/nnnn/public_html/blog/wp-content/backup-db

    If I move my .htaccess file to the directory indicated in the error my site doesn’t work. The location of the file is actually /home/nnnn/public_html/blog/ The file permissions for .htaccess are 0644. It seems like an erroneous error message, but I’m not a programmer so I wanted to see if you have an answer.

    Great read on your .htaccess post!

    Thanks!

    Tony
20. Franklin

    Hi David,

    I am having some troubles with my website in search and wanted to show you my .htaccess file to ask if you think it is set up ok. It differs a little from what you are showing on this page, and I admit that I do not understand how the commands work, but I know how to find files, so please tell me if this is structured properly or if it has some errors.

    
    # BEGIN WordPress
    
    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteBase /
    RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
    RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
    
    
    # END WordPress
    
    

    Thanks in advance
21. Matthew Smith

    # BEGIN WordPress

    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteBase /
    RewriteRule ^index\.php$ – [L]
    RewriteCond %{HTTP+HOST} ^www\.GlazingShopDWGs\.com/wordpress
    RewriteCond %{www\.GlazingShopDWGs\.com} !-d
    RewriteRule . cgi-bin/wordpress/index.php [L]

    # END WordPress
22. Gautam Lakum

    Hi David, can I use .htaccess to stop direct access to wp-content directory?
• David Walsh

  Of course Gautam! Simply use the directory path to wp-content with something similar to:

  http://davidwalsh.name/htaccess-security-include-files
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24. komal

    I have problem in htaccess rewrite rule? i want to show wordpress pages as .html
    backend i have postname structure in permalink..
    so,my pages will be come as
    http://www.abc.com/about/
    & i want be http://www.abc.com/about.html

    Any Idea???
25. Priyank Pandey

    I want do change in .htaccess file. Can you tell me where can I find this file?
    Thanks in advance.
• daffa

  @Priyank Pandey

  If you use cpanel, you can use file manager.