WordPress 2.7 Mysterious Permalinks Problem

Problem With Pretty Permalinks.

Following on from the recent WordPress update to 2.7, I’ve had the weird effect of

  • first a single post losing the pretty permalinks,
  • then two,
  • then all of them,
  • then I had a big twiddle, (this involved a lot of forum work.  This question from Storax I thought nearly had it working for me at this point as you’ll see from my posting!)
  • and now I’m back to the original weird post that doesn’t work properly.

The post is one about the self-induced motor industry crisis of poor planning and foresight combined with consumer greed in a world of limited resources – an ordinary tale. (there may be other posts with this effect, but this is the only one I’ve found!!!).  Pretty permalinks are set to…

/%post_id%/%postname%/

…which has worked for months and months without a problem.

This is what the post should be like but it doesn’t work and returns a 404:

And this is a version that works!

Weirdly, if you enter the default-should-work-in-all-cases format:

…it fails and redirects to the first duff version.

Aha! I can hear everyone cry.  It’s yer redirects, it’s yer permalinks in htaccess, it’s a plugin….  Okay.  Maybe it is.  But it doesn’t explain this behaviour in a similarly numbered, slightly later posting:

This is what it should be like:

And this version also works!

Weirdly, if you enter the default-should-work-in-all-cases format:

…this works also!!!

But that must be when you implemented a permalinks change? I hear you cry.  Possibly, it was about then.  This is the results for the next earlier posting:

So there we have it!  Exactly the same each side of the problem posting.   I’ve renamed the posting (to give it less chars as suggested in pne forum posting), remade it and re-dated it as a replacement (i.e. brand new post with same text).   I’ve changed the categories (following some forum prompts).   I’ve removed plugins.

And now I’m knackered from playing with all the permutations and eating too many Xmas sweeties….

One day I’ll crack this and let you know.  Until then, triple zeds folks.

Comments

25 responses to “WordPress 2.7 Mysterious Permalinks Problem”

  1. Brian avatar
    Brian

    Just in case anyone is still searching for an answer to the Permalinks issue in 2.7… I was able to resolve by enabling the rewrite_mod in Apache. I had read in many places about moving rewrite from none to all, but it won’t help if the mod isn’t enabled.

    So, search for rewrite in your apache config file, and enable it. Worked wonders for me, however… your mileage may vary.

    1. Strangely avatar

      @Brian

      Thanks Brian. That’s another solution to add to the list!

      The ‘effect’ of mucked up permalinks seems to be due to a variety of causes. Mine seemed to be solved by un-ticking the two WordPress options that I mentioned here. I’m still not sure if that was the reason as several things happened at once – but my permalinks work fine now, which is the main thing for me…. I must get into the actual code a bit more and trace this stuff through. But it’s a time thing…

  2. Strangely avatar

    @Pikesan
    Nice site. I’ve never seen so much chrome in one place!

    I’ve tried to go through your site. I only use WordPress as my ‘thing’ so my knowledge is confined to that. Correct me if I’m wrong…

    • It looks like your site is constructed somewhere else using a different tool.
    • You have separate forum & eShop software in use as well
    • The ‘Blog’ folder is the root of your WordPress installation.
    • This is because I can’t see any WordPress files in any other folder

    With that in mind, I’ve checked your sitemap.xml and your robots.txt One thing IMMEDIATELY hit me from your sitemap.
    You have a lot of pictures locked into a location such as this:

    https://www.myrideisme.com/stored_public/member_pic/2/234/f51985d5a3f683a83795b54c88372fc0.jpg

    This seems very odd! Weirdly, it takes me to a valid (very big) picture, and if I trim off the /234/ , there’s no picture even though it should be! All there is, is a picture placemarker. Now it gets really weird…
    Right-click the placemarker and check the ‘picture’ properties….. It says the path is:

    https://www.myrideisme.com/stored_public/member_pic//f51985d5a3f683a83795b54c88372fc0.jpg

    I think, although I’m not an expert, that you have some redirection going on. It’s turning /FullImage/ into /stored_public/member_pic//

    So I’d check through that for starters!

    AS for resetting permalinks, this only applies to your WordPress, which, as I said, appears to be only rooted in the /blog/ folder. Resetting is a simple matter. You just whack them back to the defaults so that your links look like:

    https://www.myrideisme.com/Blog/?attachment_id=42

    You do this from the WordPress admin page here:
    Admin -> Settings -> Permalinks -> default
    That’s it. Yours is probably located here:
    https://www.myrideisme.com/Blog/wp-login.php?redirect_to=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.myrideisme.com%2FBlog%2Fwp-admin%2Foptions-permalink.php&reauth=1

    Saying that, you have a custom front-end for registrations and login and there are redirects on those as well so I reckon it’s all tied up in that. I have WordPress right in my root and everything cascades off that. I’ve no experience of integrating lots of stuff like you’ve done. I DO know that you have to be careful (a bit late to say that now, I know)

    Also, your shop at is in a sub-domain. You get weird effects with this I’ve heard when using .htaccess and doing redirects. So you need to read up on that – it could be that you’ve some interaction.

    Sorry I can be of any more use. It may have given you some pointers though.

  3. Pikesan avatar

    Hello,
    Some great info here, thanks! I’m having a weird problem and the forum only says to “reset” my permalinks (not sure how) and it’ll be fixed.
    My problem is that my posts become “un-published”. They’re there, published, then some how people are getting 404 notices, then I investigate and find that the stories are now, “in limbo” as not a draft and not published! What else is there? If I publish them, again, they’re back and everything’s fine.

    Any idea what’s caueing this?
    thank you!

  4. Strangely avatar

    @Sandy

    Check mine:

    https://strangelyperfect.tv/robots.txt

    any WELL-BEHAVED robot will look at this and do as it’s told. The long string of folders aren’t real – they are added as the early translation plugins I used to use gave multiple SEO hits which is bad.

    You can have multiple sitemaps in your root (or anywhere actually) as long as they are unique paths. Google itself has several in it’s root.

    In essence, all you need for yourself is:

    Sitemap: http://sandykumskov.com/sitemap.xml.gz
    Sitemap: http://sandykumskov.com/sitemap.xml
    User-agent: *
    Disallow: /none/

    This should work. If you’ve any private-ish folders you don’t want trawled by a robot, add it to the list like I did. A full path isn’t absolutely necessary for a folder – just make sure you’ve got the trailing ‘/’

    Try this link and follow throughs for info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_Exclusion_Standard

    As your 404s are from Google and it’s a well-behaved robot, they should stop.

    …I think!

    If you recheck the sitemaps pluging tick box, it’ll overwrite your nice robots.txt with it’s own… This is bad.!!

  5. Sandy avatar
    Sandy

    what what what???

    you’re saying – untick “Add sitemap URL to the virtual robots.txt file.” and this should all go away.

    Excuse the delay while I pick myself up of the floor….

  6. Sandy avatar
    Sandy

    Hiya
    Thanks for all this info – with a few sites to get fixed, all showing the same errors, it’s looking and feeling like a huge job! Takes away from the core business you know? I do know that I won’t be jumping into any wordpress upgrades again in a hurry!

    I found a ‘smart 404’ plugin, which seems to be a kind of redirect, so will play with that as well…

    I’d rather be marketing 🙂

    Sandy

    1. Strangely avatar

      @Sandy

      I forgot… there is one thing;

      # BEGIN XML-SITEMAP-PLUGIN
      Sitemap: http://sandykumskov.com/sitemap.xml.gz
      # END XML-SITEMAP-PLUGIN
      User-agent: *
      Disallow: /none/

      This means you had a tick box checked in the Google Sitemaps plugin. Untick it. It’s not needed. Google is very well behaved and looks for the standard naming conventions without being told. The ‘disallow’ bit should be enough to stop the current 404s. Add the path to the sitemap to the robots.txt file manually – it’s not a big deal; and you only need to do it once.

      If a robot is badly behaved, then it deserves all the 404s it can get!

  7. Sandy avatar
    Sandy

    wow – that’s a bit mind bending – thank you!!! I’ll fiddle with robots.txt tonight and check the stats tomorrow. I did deactivate all my seo plugins for a few days to see if that made a difference, it didn’t seem to :/

    How do you get google to redirect for a permalink structure change?
    Thanks for your time and interest, much appreciated to find a fix even if we don’t know the cause 🙂

    Sandy Kumskov

    1. Strangely avatar

      @Sandy
      Since the only problem (I think) is the appending of the /none/ to the URL, you don’t need redirects. In fact, because your site is relatively small (i.e. it’s not really a blog with gallons of quick snippets; you’re just using WordPress as an information publishing tool with this info in quite largish chunks), your present permalink structure is most likely OK. You only run into difficulties if you post messages with the same title. WP gets round this using the ‘slug’, but it’s awkward for your users. That’s why I said to add an extra variable. If I made a post called “Pigs” and then the next year made another called “pigs”, I’d have two nearly identical (as a human) posts. WP sees them as identical (everything is lower case) and would give the second one a slug of “pigs-2” which is what would appear in the address and is clumsy, for a human.

      I don’t use the plugin currently, but I used ‘Dean’s Permalinks Migration‘ to good effect when I needed it. Be sure to look for the 1.1-gx version as the original has an issue… Read about it here and the download link is here (as a zip) on George’s site. George has left a good description of this here. The one on WordPress is the duff one!

      Have a look for ‘Permalinks Redirection’ or something. There are quite a few other plugins that do the same job. I’ve tried a few in the past but some had ‘issues’, probably with other plugins. I do a mix-and-match approach and am quite ruthless with stuff that wastes too much of my time experimenting – after I’ve had a bit of a play, of course. One is discussed here that looks promising…

      As for the htaccess approach. Look for ‘htaccess 301 redirect’ or something in Google – there’s oodles of info. From your sitemap, you’ve about 40 pages so you could easily code each page individually. Here’s what I did nearly a year ago….

      I took out all redirection
      I recoded all internal links
      I implemented 301 redirects to a few key pages in htaccess

      To fix all internal links, I did it semi-manually. I download the whole database using phpADMIN and then searched and replaced key bits of string in a text editor. When all the links were done, I uploaded the new database. It took less than an hour. It means I don’t need a plugin as I’m happy with my new permalink structure. A tiny bit in htaccess does the rest and anyway, any duff links are in really old posts, some of my early posts were crap and no-one looks at them so no harm if they’re knackered.

      You don’t have to do this, of course. Use a plugin, change your permalinks structure and any future postings will pick up the new structure. Only you can choose what’s best. It may be that you are coming to the end of entries in this website so minimal work needs to be done. If you can see your post count increasing by an order of magnitude or two (i.e. 10-100 times), then you have to make a cool decision soon that you can live with.

      Of course, all the knowledge you pick up you can use when setting up and maintaining other websites! Good luck.

  8. Strangely avatar

    @Sandy

    An interesting quest indeed.

    My gut feeling is to think out of the box after the trouble I had.
    First, make sure you’ve unticked the WordPress options I mentioned.
    Second, have a look at your plugin options. I don’t know what you use but the only things that do the ACTION that you are noticing are SEO/Tag?/image type plugins that stick “Nofollow” after everything.

    Obviously this isn’t exactly the same but you are getting text appended to a link…. think about it. There could be a setting you’ve flipped recently or you’ve tried a new plugin. There could be interactions between plugins also.

    When you try to trace this stuff, it’s imperative to empty every cache you can find and turn off all the mechanisms. I got confused by my ISP’s caching once or twice… it’s goes weird sometimes and serves old pages and randomly blocks domains…

    Any plugins like this I’d re-install using ‘FTP’. Things can go odd just sat on the server, I’ve found.

    Translator plugins do something similar as well and make a folder for each language for SEO reasons. I’ve blocked this behaviour in htaccess and the robots.txt file when I’ve used them. Maybe you could do the same. You need to use a special string to get it right. Certainly the robots.txt is easy to do with wildcards and Google (which has 90% of the search market) adheres to the sitemap standards. At least you won’t lose SEO rank.

    ..I’ve just checked your robots file. Try this:

    # BEGIN XML-SITEMAP-PLUGIN
    Sitemap: http://sandykumskov.com/sitemap.xml.gz
    # END XML-SITEMAP-PLUGIN
    User-agent: *
    Disallow: /none/

    This will tell Google NOT to look in any folder called ‘none’ and so hopefully it won’t go there to return a 404! – it still doesn’t explain what’s doing it, but it mitigates the effect.

    Finally, your permalink structure really needs another variable in it for clarity. That’s why I stuck the postid in mine.

    Finally (yes really this time), don’t forget you can use htaccess or plugins to do redirects for you if you change your permalink structure. This way you don’t lose your traffic and rankings.

  9. Sandy avatar
    Sandy

    Well this is an interesting quest… I noticed from my log files a huge number of 404 pages coming up, at about the same time as the number of signups to my newsletter slowed down. Actually I didn’t notice it until a good few weeks after it happened, because I guess I wasn’t really paying that close attention. Anyway, I was browsing my stats one day when I decided to look at my error pages. As I say, there were hundreds of errors, and they were in this form:
    domain/postname/none. All the incoming urls had this strange /none/ appended to them. What the? Every incoming link from a search engine, painstaking built over many months, was now pointing to a 404 because of /none/ appending to all URLs, out of nowhere?

    It does seem to have happened after I did the upgrade to 2.7. I’ve checked my other websites as well, same deal. I fiddled about with deactivating plugins and so on, posted on the wordpress forum, changed templates etc. Someone on a forum yesterday suggested there might be a problem with my permalink structure – it just says /%postname%/ in the custom field, which is the same as it’s been for many months I believe.

    If I type in any url, or click on any link on the blog, all pages work. It’s “just” the incoming links that are the problem 🙂

    So I’m wondering if you’d looked at your own log files and noticed the 404s, and if it was the same problem as mine?

    I’m not game to change my permalinks back to default because of the great traffic I’ve built over the last months – but then again, if that traffic is mostly getting 404s, no harm done I suppose….

  10. GalleryUCCS avatar

    The fun never ends with Permalinks!
    Since the people on the WordPress forums have nothing to say about this, maybe you can help, or need a new challenge.

    Last year the galleryuccs.org site couldn’t find post image links, but then it could if you changed the date for the post. Seemed like an odd work-around by the old administrator, but easy enough.

    Then, the 2009 folder I made that has this year’s images for shows was and still is impossible to find by wordpress.
    The site uses the custom link formula of %category%/%year%/%postname%.

    Also, on the post I’m trying to make where only name of the post’s text shows up instead of the image, I copied the image location, and for the thumbnail it used the 2008 folder, and for the full-size it used the 2007 folder.

    Try it for yourself, using either one of the upcoming Exhibits (lower left part of home page).

    I’d be grateful for a solution, my .htaccess page is fine, btw.

    Millie

    1. Strangely avatar

      As you say Millie, the fun never ends!
      Initially I couldn’t see anything wrong. Your links seem to match the pictures you’ve got.
      But wait! What’s this? To the bat-cave…..

      I decided to check your image locations. Now bear with me, because I don’t use WordPress’s way of doing things – storing uploads and pictures in a folder heirarchy and especially the new method of mixing all the various picture sizes together… The reason for this is that I use the ImageManager plugin. This has had it’s ups and downs since I first installed it ages ago. But it means that the multi-image way that WordPress does stuff, I don’t use, although some other sites I look after do things that way. I also know that WordPress changed their way of handling pictures a couple of version points back. This again, passed me by because I don’t use it.
      These are two support posts I’ve found: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/190467 http://wordpress.org/support/topic/166622 You get the idea.

      If I take the top image, it’s link points to https://www.uccs.edu/~goca/upcoming_exhibits/2009/2009_faculty-2 and the picture location is at https://www.uccs.edu/~goca/2008/i/2009_faculty_sm.jpg
      The problems for me are the little “i” folder….. What’s that all about? Also, as you say, the small picture is in the /2008/ folder root instead of the /2009/. Also, you have the pictures’ folder all in the root. The normal place to stuff your pictures etc is in the wp-content folder and sub-folder down from that. I think I remember reading somewhere that WordPress needs to be told the content folder if it’s not in the default place – the wp-config file probably. There are some admin screen settings too.

      My experience is not to muck about with the defaults too much for WordPress. As far as I can see, your permalink structure is okay. If your WP install is in your root, I should move all the images to https://www.uccs.edu/~goca/wp-content/. For myself, I use NextGEN gallery which makes a sub-folder called /gallery/ and all my other pictures go in /uploads/. The ImageManager plugin makes an /image/ folder inside /uploads/ as well, and then a /.thumbs/ folder inside that for the thumbnails. These are the defaults but they can be changed from the plugin admin screen.
      That’s my site. I don’t know if you are doing the same sort of thing, but I’d certainly check out the config pointers for WordPress. The new method of picture generation must be pretty dependant on this. It looks to me that it’s confused somehow and is spraying the pictures around using some sort of memory setting that’s wrong.

      Various posters have suggested there’s no automatic way to move from one picture structure to another – well I’ve done it! Semi-automatically.

      Being a born twiddler, I’ve tried lots of WP plugins, pictures and otherwise. There is NO consistent way of doing images. Thumbnails, folders – the lot. Always different, plugins and even WordPress. What I HAVE done is to re-assign all the links when I’ve made a structural change to the image folders and setups to get back to the way it was… How?

      Install the Maintenance Mode plugin and set it off for a few hours!
      Download your WP database using phpAdmin to your desktop. Use the DROP TABLE setting.
      Make a copy of the file – in case you muck it up!
      Now decide on a folder structure for your images.
      COPY them into the new structure (you can delete all the old structure once it’s up and working). Use your FTP or host’s software.
      Now open your database on your desktop with a text editor – I use Editor2 from https://www.zabkat.com Notepad’s okay at a pinch, but it’s slow in comparison. The database is actually plain text. Don’t use MSWord or anything like that. Plain text, that’s all.
      It looks awful as all the code is jumbled up with the data structure. Don’t worry, this works. I’ve done it. Twice!
      Now find some commonality to do a find and replace for your old folder patterns to your new ones. Remember, that a is text too! This can help to nail down some unique text strings to find & replace on.
      Start at the top of the file (you’ll have megabytes of text here). Once you are confident that you’re picking up the data correctly and it’s getting replaced into your new file-paths, set it away to “Replace All”. This will take a few seconds. Minutes with notepad.
      Now repeat for all the various gross structural changes you are going to make to the folder’s names etc. Start at the top of the file each time. You don’t want to lose your place!

      Once done, upload your new, modified database file to your WP database using phpAdmin again for the import. You’ll have set it initially to DROP TABLE so it’ll wipe out your old database and replace it with the new.
      Switch off maintenance mode and see if it’s worked. You may have a few manual tweaks to do. Use a link checker like the Broken Link Checker plugin or something like Xenu’s Link Sleuth to check the whole website for duff links. (You should do this periodically to check for Link Rot anyway).

      This sounds a lot, but I have over 2000 posts in this website with about 300 ‘standard’ pix and thousands of gallery pix. It took me an hour or two last time. I mucked it up once and uploaded the orginal database and started again. A sort of poor-mans roll-back. So if you looked at an early post of mine like https://strangelyperfect.tv/74/don-martin/ it has a picture located at https://strangelyperfect.tv/wp-content/uploads/the_paleontologist_don_martin.jpg and the thumbnail is at https://strangelyperfect.tv/wp-content/uploads/the_paleontologist_don_martin.jpg
      – But it hasn’t always been like this! I originally had stuff straight in the ‘uploads’ folder and the post would have been called https://strangelyperfect.tv/74/don-martin/ All the changes (and some!) were all manual find and replaces using the method above. Looking at the post now, it could do with the www removing as well. Missed that!

      This may or may not help you. But I’m pretty sure it’s not a permalinks problem.

      Oh! I’ve just remembered as this was so long winded; check the folder permissions on the picture folders. They should be 705 or 755. Something like that. If you’ve got the 2009 one as 111 or something low like that, WordPress can’t write to it. Check that there isn’t an invisible .htaccess blocking jpgs or something as well. Depending on your FTP/host software, there may be some settings to show hidden files and extra attributes. Any file that starts with a . is hidden.

    2. Strangely avatar

      Hi Millie.
      Thanks for getting back in your private message.
      I’ve had another think after reading your post again. I see you made a folder and then uploaded pix to it.
      This could be a problem as well as I think WP has to upload the pix at which point it makes all the various sized pictures. I think a db entry ios made at the same time – at least that’s what I deduced from my own experiments.

      Also, the top folder name (2009) overlaps your permalink structure. So some confusion could arise there.

      The two plugins I use and mentioned earlier work the way I want for me. For NextGen, I let it make a folder and then FTP 1-200 pix at a go into it (to get past the 2Mb upload limit, this is the best way). NG then has lots of optiopns to make thumbs & add tags etc. Either Albums, Galleries or individual pictures can be inserted into a post or page from the toolbar.
      Image Manager works in a similar way but only on 1 pic at a time but it does have a neat thumbnail & popup generation all in one go. You can go up and down the file structure looking for pix as well.

      In future, I may set both plugins to a master “images” folder in wp-content. Not yet though. When I have time!

      BTW, how may posts/pix have you if you had to manually edit each page & post entry on your website? If it’s less than 50-100 with (say) 4 pix per page, it’d probably take an afternoon to manually do the changes. In this case, I’d MOVE ALL your pix to a sensible folder structure with a root of “images” say, and then use a link checker to set each picture manually because they seem to be in a bit of a jumble.

  11. Marios Alexandrou avatar

    I’m having similar problems… I publish or update a page and my site starts to return 404 errors for all requests except the home page. The only thing that fixes the problem is to change the permalink structure and then change it back to what I had originally set. After doing that my site works fine until the next page update or addition.

    This particular site is on IIS suggesting that the issue is not with .htaccess files or anything specific to Apache/Linux. I’ve also tried turning on and off plugins with no success.

    1. Strangely avatar

      The WP help says to flip back to defaults and then to the style you want. This just seems like a bit of a pain though, if every time you add a page or whatever you have to do that rigmarole.
      I know they say that WP can run on IIS, but my gut feeling is that if something is designed to run on a particular system from the outset, i.e. LAMP, then it’s probably best to stick with it.

      I’ve no experience with IIS. But looking at how my problem was fixed (see above), perhaps you’d better have a fiddle with the various WordPress settings. Try putting everything to minimum, unticking lots of options and make sure the various caches (inc your browser) are also cleared out & switched off. I had a lot of bother with that, some of it being my ISP cache as well which went awry just at the same time (Pipex support at weekends doesn’t exist!). Stuff like this makes troubleshooting really hard.

      Also, re-upload all WP files etc as if for a clean install, deleting the folders as appropriate. Make sure that the various folder permissions (including the root – I forgot that one once!) are correct.

      And try some of the things that people above have done. Your site seems okay currently as I’ve just looked. I’ll RSS you to watch it for a bit to see if I can spot when it goes wrong…That may give me some hints.

      Rees

  12. theputernerd avatar
    theputernerd

    I had some troubles getting permalinks to work on a fresh install. I found that the problem was related to both apache httpd.conf configuration problem and .htaccess redirects not working correctly.
    I have also found that WP does not seem to cope well with alternating betwen permalink types.

    1. Strangely avatar

      Thanks.
      I don’t have access to the conf file with my host, but I’ve sorted my problem now, even though I’m still not sure exactly why! This is probably summed up in your final sentence “WP does not seem to cope well with alternating betwen permalink types” with the key word being “cope”. It seems a bit of a black hole really.

  13. Strangely avatar

    SUCCESS!!!

    I had a bit of trouble early today, see wp-super-cache-manager-prompts-needless-wordpress-27-update. After a few hiccups, I re-instated wp-supercache and I turned off the Google XML Sitemaps plugin for good measure as it’s updating was doing my head in.

    This got the blog going and a bit speedier – but I think it was all due to my host’s server(s) falling over.

    Later twiddling today:
    As a way of experimenting and after seeing some posts that recommend having emoticons turned off – I turned them off. (see mike-industries-now-powered-by-wordpress)

    I also unchecked the ‘WordPress should correct invalidly nested XHTML automatically’ checkbox.
    These are both found on Settings -> Writing in the admin screen, on blogroot/wp-admin/options-writing.php

    Straight away, the site loaded quicker and I thought “let’s type in that annoying post, 603!!!”
    So I typed the default query string, the ‘works-under-all-circumstances‘ setting, https://strangelyperfect.tv/603/gm-bmw-all-gotta-change-or-die-like-jaws/ because I couldn’t remember the post’s correct name.

    And it all worked!!! – the three versions of a post, tested on all three posts at the top of this post. They all worked.

    I’m just soooo happy, this has bugged me for ages!

  14. Strangely avatar

    Penny.
    If it’s all the posts on your site then it must be the handler bit. Didn’t I see somewhere (this is new ground to me BTW) that you need to cover for different versions of php. That may have something to do with it – unfortunately, I don’t know as I don’t use stuff like that. But I think the handling I’ve seen is in the site settings on my ixWebhosting account which wrotes the php.ini file I think.

    As you’ll have gathered, my problem is one post out of several sites! I’ve done the supercache/browser cache/ISP cache/domain workings kind of checks and fixes over the last few months…

    The supercache was like yourself http://pennybutler.com/wordpress/troubleshooting/cache-nightmare-now-site-fixed I’ve flipped the thing on and off to get stuff working;

    Browsers: I’ve refreshed, re-installed, checked the site from different places (the office!) and used different browsers;

    ISP cacheing reared it’s head a few months back when I couldn’t access parts of my sites or some of my emails….That took a weekend on the dismal Pipex support;

    Domain workings – I had undefined dropouts and inaccessiblity to all sites. After getting some evidence by using a free site monitor, http://www.serviceuptime.com ixWebhosting got back within a day and said “the problem will never, ever return”, but they didn’t say what it was…

    Anyway, your problem is bigger than mine but mine is weirder, I think! It’s just so infuriating when you can compare installations side by side and not find anything wrong.

  15. Penny avatar

    Oh I am so subscribing to this page.. this has wasted 2 days of my time and 4 hours of bluehost’s support time.

    I have upgraded 12 of my sites to WordPress 2.7 without any issue, but one site is doing this, where I cannot create any new pages without getting a redirection loop. Turn permalinks back to default it works – but I cant do this, I will lose all the urls that are listed in the search engines for the past few years.

    All are working fine on my hostgator account. Some are working fine on my bluehost accounts, however the “main domain” on a bluehost account is causing this issue, and I believe it’s something to do with the .htaccess or php.ini files because it works fine if I remove the AddHandler application/x-httpd-php5s .php from my .htaccess file, however – need that line for my store. So crappy.. just writing this comment to subscribe to more comments.. 🙂

    Penny x

  16. sneh avatar
    sneh

    may I ask how did you fix it? I urgently need help on this one.

    1. Strangely avatar

      I haven’t – yet! I’m still trying various permutations of things. However….

      I did find a few other posts to the one above and I fixed it by editing it, resetting the post slug, changing a category and saving it. It fixed itself. But it hasn’t worked on the one above.

      Also, I’ve started going through all my posts to make the post slugs and permalinks have the same initial format. Maybe when it’s done I can remove all the permalink “fixer” type plugins and see how things work from there.

      On the other hand, my post count is rapidly mounting, V2.8 will probably be out by then and a new version may fix it anyway to save what is becoming a “big job”..

    2. Strangely avatar

      I have one last thing to try….
      Methodically, I’ve been through lots of stuff today to try and nail this thing down – all to no avail. This is what I’ve done. At each step I went to this post and tested against the page links, or, when I renamed the problem posting, I used the new name.

      Turn off plugins
      re-install WordPress 2.7
      turn permalinks back to defaults
      clear out .htaccess file and save the text somewhere for later
      now make custom permalinks
      WordPress makes a new entry in .htaccess
      copy the old .htaccess entries abovethe new permalinking stuff in the .htaccess file
      it was at this point, the remaking of the custom permalinks that the problem returned so…
      re-enabled all the pligins

      What I have left to do is remake the wholepost with a newer shorter title. It’s something to try. I’ll copy the pure html into the post, think of a catchy short name and then try it. I had an idea it may be the length or maybe the actual sequence of the text string that’s making something fall over… 🙁

      Failing that, I may give a different custom pretty permalink a try, although I’m loath to as it should work as it is and it seems to for all the hundreds of other posts I’ve made.

      As part of my research I revisited the WordPress Codex and also Ask Apache who has several plugins that I thought might help. They didn’t, but it’s a very interesting website, if you understand or want to understand Apache.

      Let me know if you find a fix before me please!

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