Getting the pretty Permalink’s to work on this blog has been a bit of a pain, According to word press you click on the format you want under the settings and then they should all work nicely.

so rather than have a link that looks like

“http://www.devilwah.com/?p=344”

you can have the same link looking like

“http://www.devilwah.com/2010/09/minority-report-the-reality/”

Pretty 🙂 right.. 😉

So how did I get it all up and running?

I found out when first trying to activate it that I came across a “page not found error” suggesting that the mod_rewrite module in Apache was not running correctly. And after lots of searching around I found it this is to do with the “Allowoveride” directive in Apache.

The default setting for the directive in the virtual site file in Unbuntu is,

<Directory />

Options FollowSymLinks

AllowOverride None

</Directory>

Further reading suggests that with this set to none, the .htaccess file that is needed for  mod_rewrite to be able to work will not be used.

Searching the net lots of people suggest changing this to “Allowoverride All”, which after a restart of Apache will work fine. But for a little more security I found “Allowoverride FileInfo” will achieve the same thing.

And that’s it, one little word change is the difference between it all working fine and page not found!

The same can be achieved by editing the httpd.conf and associated config files, but as I use virtual sites I prefer editing these directly.

Thank fully the old style links still work just find, the mod_rewrite simple takes the pretty version of the link and translates it back to the ugly version behind the scene. Leaving you the user with a more pleasurable browsing experience.  🙂

DevilWAH