gorbould

Well, I used that suggestion, and found that it had been here all along:

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/49968?replies=25#post-436575

Prepending “index.php” makes everything else work.

/index.php/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/

Must be a NetFirms thing, which I’ll complain about.

I’d love to find a way to get that index.php out of the filenames, so all my old posts imported from Blogger will end up in the right place. In the meantime, should I just figure out how to create redirects for all 50 of my old posts?

moshu: Wow, thanks for that link… wish I had read that months ago. But it seems like NetFirms is getting up to speed.

I got this (not terribly helpful) message from their support:

Not all the permalink structures are supported. We recommend one of two that has been tested and proven to work:

Example #1: To have your posts display individually as (for example)
http://yourdomain.com/yourblog/nfblog/2006/02/03/sample-post/
enter the following:

/index.php/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

Example #2: To have your posts display as:
http://yourdomain.com/yourblog/nfblog/archives/123 (this uses the post id), enter:

/index.php/archives/%post_id%

So they seem to think it can be made to work… we’ll see. If we can solve that Archives issue, I might be the first 🙂

You guys are life savers! That fixed it up.

So, now I’m back to where I was. And in fact, I’m one step better. An IT buddy dropped by just before this most recent problem and fiddled with my htaccess file to try different variables.

When I replaced this:

RewriteRule . /blog/index.php [L]

with this:

RewriteRule (.*) /blog/index.php/$1 [L]

…the pretty permalinks started working. Well, they work for the posts, and pages (e.g. About) – but they still don’t work for the Archives.

When I click on September 2006, for example, I get an error page that says “in order to view your homepage, please name your main page “index.htm” (using lower case letters).”

Any suggestions on this? It must be that htaccess business again, no? I can almost taste it… and again, thanks for your advice.

I tried that, and the forward slashes disappear after I hit “Update Options”.

But now I’ve really gone and done it… when I was experimenting with this, I tried removing the “http://” in front (so it looked like your example, above – http://www.gorbould.com/blog) – and that has taken my blog entirely offline! And I can’t even get into the WP control panel.

What can I do?? (weeps quietly…)

The blog is installed in a subdirectory (gorbould.com/blog) but that’s also where it stays – I don’t use WP for the root. Would I still have to make this change? (and if so, could you be more explicit – e.g. is it the wp-config.php file, and how would I change it?)

I was looking again at the .htaccess file. I emptied it out and changed the settings, and I also deleted it, FTPed a blank one, changed the permanlinks settings and chmod 666. This is what WP created, but it doesn’t seem to have much in it:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /blog/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /blog/index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

Should this be sufficient to use the new permalinks?

Well, turns out I just needed patience. I kept resetting the importer and trying again, and after dozens of tries it eventually made it all the way through. I guess it was just a timeout/communication issue, which shouldn’t have surprised me. Broken pipe errors between Blogger and my host were the reason I switched to WP in the first place.

I did run into some weirdness once the import was done. For some reason it would choose to “skip” whole sections of my archives – so I got just September and October the first and subsequent times. What solved it was changing the datestamp on some old posts to October (thanks, Greasemonkey!) and then running the import again. It grabbed most of them the next time. I changed the dates on a few more, then changed them back in WP, and everything’s spiffy.