Pretty URL’s in Wordpress for Netfirms

I was literally banging my head since a week about my wordpress blog installation. I installed a fresh version of wordpress deleting my previous one thinking it might be faulty. But the Pretty Urls function of the permalink simply did not work for me. Suddenly it hit upon me that something might actually be wrong with my hosting provider. So I googled for “Netfirms wordpress permalinks”. And there were literally hundreds of resources waiting for me to rectify the problem. Even a friend of mine had the same problem. But getting them to work on my latest wordpress(2.3) took me a while since I had to go through all the updates. So here’s an updated version.

Pre-Requisites: Things You Need for the Hack to Work

• Wordpress 2.3
• PHP 4 (Check this in Netfirms Control Panel)
• Enable .htaccess in your Netfirms Control Panel.
• Pretty URL’s Permalink Structure: Date and name based. I tested it only for this type of permalink structure. But theoretically it should work for all structures.

Wordpress 2.3 Guide to Pretty URL’s for Netfirms:

• Download Disable Canonical URL Redirection plugin, upload it to your wp-content/plugins directory and install it.
• Change the Permalink Structure and press Update Permalink Structure.
• Download your .htaccess file from your blog base directory.
• The file contents should be as given below:
  # BEGIN WordPress
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /blog/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !index.php
RewriteRule (.*) index.php/$1 [L]

# END WordPress
• Change the RewriteBase to the base directory of your blog.
• Save and Upload the .htaccess file to the base directory of your blog.
• Change the permissions of the blog to 444.

That should do it! You will have the permalinks working like a charm.
Here are some question you might ask and these are the resources I found when I had my problem. This blog wouldn’t be running if not for these.

• Canonical URL’s in Wordpress 2.3
• Joelika’s Blog Post - Check out comments by Steve about wordpress 2.3 and Joel’s replies.
• My Friend’s Blog - About how he had the same problem with wordpress 2.1.1

Edit: The step 1 of the guide, Disable Canonical URL’s plugin, causes header return errors when editing posts and while using wp-admin. You can do the following instead of step 1 of the guide.

• Edit wp-includes/canonical.php file.
• Find the last line add_action('template_redirect', 'redirect_canonical'); and comment it out.
• Now it should look like this: //add_action('template_redirect', 'redirect_canonical');
• Save the file.
• All other steps are the same.