fredrileyI know, I know, this must be a FAQ, but I can't find a satisfactory resolution of it despite searching for the last hour and a half. I need to set up 'pretty permalinks' for a site I'm transferring to WP, to use WP as a CMS. There's a long and detailed document called "Using Permalinks" which I've read closely.
Essentially, I'm trying to replicate the site structure of my static site. So I'm after links such as:
<host>/about/
<host>/join/
etc. It looked like using a custom permalink %postname% would do the job, and this is what I've used, but according to the fine manual:
For performance reasons, it is not a good idea to start your permalink structure with the category, tag, author, or postname fields
I'm not creating a blog so the various date-related options in the Dashboard aren't appropriate, and I don't want numeric URLs because they've no human meaning. I've tried using the following in the .htaccess in the WP root:
# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress
as recommended in the support doc, and this does seem to do something, as without it, using %postname% as a base, everything but the home page returns a 404 (as reported in this post). Even reading the Apache manual on mod_rewrite I still can't see what the above is supposed to do anyway.
So the question is: how can I implement pretty permalinks like this without using %postname% or %category%? If I can't, then I'll just have to put up with the performance hit.
I've looked in the FAQ, and I've searched the fora for "pretty permalinks" and looked at topics in the first two result pages (there are 000s of results and only a limited lifespan), without finding anything directly useful. I'd be grateful if someone could point me in the right direction. Plainly this is possible because many WP sites implement it, and I suspect it'll be really easy to do.
Fred
lashbrooke
Eric3D
