To The Moon And Back

I encountered a problem recently when I upgraded my client’s wordpress 2.5 to 2.6. All the single posts cannot be found even if I could see them from the wp admin panel. I tried playing with permalinks option, changed it to default and then all of a sudden, all the single pages are working. The problem occurs whenever I change the permalinks to ‘Custom’. A quick solution is posted at wordpress.org here.

1. If you’re using Linux/Apache on your webserver, you don’t really need the index.php anyway. Try removing it. The index.php thing was only meant for IIS servers, which don’t support mod_rewrite.

2. If you need/want the index.php to be there, then on the Settings->Permalinks screen, add some values in for the category and tag bases. The words “category” and “tag” will do just fine. As long as they are not blank, this should work around the bug.

3. (For advanced users only) If you want to patch the problem yourself, there is a fix available in trac ticket 7306.

Unfortunately, it didn’t work for me. Good thing I found this article “How to Fix Permalinks in Wordpress When All Else Fails”. The process involves uploading an updated rewrite.php file and then setting your permalinks option back to Custom. In a matter of five minutes, my client’s blog is up and running properly.

Wordpress is aware of this permalinks bug in 2.6. You can check it out here.