WordPress mod_rewrite returns 403 Forbidden

I’ve been looking into this problem for a couple of days now, everyone, and I’m pretty perplexed; mostly because my knowledge of mod_rewrite doesn’t go much farther beyond being able to do simple rewrites.

When I was working on deploying a comic website using WordPress 1.5, (interesting idea, huh?) I worked on it in “/redesign” until it was all ready to go. Everything worked perfectly, including permalinks, (the archives are an important part of a webcomic!) but when I moved the design to “/” (root) on May 2nd, permalinks died.

The server was indeed parsing the .htaccess in root, because I was able to get custom error pages and other simple rewrites working, (except fot any that take a virtual directory and rewrite it to index.php – the WordPress ones) but it would return a 403: Forbidden error as if it was actually trying to access a physical directory “/2005“. I don’t understand why it returns a 403 and not a 404, but I have a hunch it has something to do with the way the index files on speakeasy hosting (the hosting company) are parsed.

From what I’ve found via google on people who have had the same problem with mod_rewrite, their server had some apache mod_rewrite option called ‘FollowSymLinks’ or ‘SymLinksIfOwnerMatch’ turned off by default and they had to enable it by adding “Options +FollowSymLinks” or “Options +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch” before “RewriteEngine on” in their .htaccess. I’ve tried both of these, to no avail.

There may be something you can offer, there may be nothing at all — I figure it doesn’t hurt to ask and see if anyone has run into this in the past on certain server configurations. If I can’t figure it out by the weekend, I figure on rewriting the entire directory of “/” to “/redesign“, (because it seems to work fine in there!) but I’m not sure what sort of unforseen consequences could arise from doing this.

I’m using WordPress 1.5 with only some basic plugins installed (like wp-paginate, text control, two of kitten’s spam plugins, and a few others – nothing that should interfere with permalinks) and the design is located at http://www.dandyandcompany.com, although I’ve got it re-written to “/redesign” as a temporary fix, so you won’t be able to replicate my problem.

Anyone know anything about this? Thanks in advance.