.htaccess file questions

Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 at 5:20 pm

Permalinks and .htaccess [ 2:13 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Today’s question is:

Under options, permalinks, I set the field to â€œcustomâ€ and added the /%category%/%postname%/ to make it SEO friendly.

I got this message below. I donâ€™t have a clue what to do with this instruction or what it means.

If your .htaccess file were writable, we could do this automatically, but it isnâ€™t so these are the mod_rewrite rules you should have in your .htaccess file. Click in the field and press CTRL + a to select all. (I can see the code I need to click). But now what?

The .htaccess file sets the rules that will allow you to use custom permalinks. If you have copied the code you just need to access the .htaccess file and add that information.

Log in to your cpanel – click file manager – and locate your .htaccess file (probably in public_html) if your blog is in the root of the site. Click to edit and add that code into the file and save it.

Now if your .htaccess file shows when you ftp in to the server (it doesn’t always depends on server settings) the easiest thing is to just cham=nge the permissions (chmod) to 666 and redo the permalink change in your dashboard.

The fact that it is not writable was what kept the blog from doing it originally.

As always your comments and questions are welcomed. Leave a comment or use our survey form to ask your question.

Mike Paetzold