A reader of my WordPress For Dummies book1 submitted this question today:
I’ve been through WordPress for Dummies twice already.
I’m setting up a new blog and I’m running into something I’ve not experienced before. I have two (2) sticky posts displaying on my front page, each post tagged with several categories. For some reason when I click on any link, I’m getting a 404 Not Found Error. I’ve set up several WordPress blogs, but never with this issue.
Can you suggest a solution for resolution?
Thanks and Happy New Year!
My response:
Check your permalinks rules (under Options/Permalinks in your WordPress Administration Panel) and make sure your .htaccess file has the correct re_write rules written to it to make sure the permalinks work correctly. When you set the permalinks in your WordPress Administration panel - WordPress will only write those rules to the .htaccess if that file exists and is writeable… and if the server you are working on has the Apache mod_re_write module installed and activated.
If you don’t know whether or not the server you are working with has the Apache mod_re_write module installed - contact your web hosting provider, they should be able to tell you that information.
As a side note - Yahoo! hosting does not give users access to the .htaccess file, so you are not able to use the permalink structure given by WordPress. Though, I believe that Yahoo has its own plugin that works around this issue, please contact them for support if you are hosting your WordPress blog with their services.
Hope that helps!
- Permalinks, .htaccess and information about these re_write rules can be found in Chapter 8: pages 144 - 146 in the WordPress For Dummies book. [↩]
