Wordpress and permalinks without mod_rewrite
Fri, 07 Sep 2007 01:21 - Daniel - Blogs - Comments (2)
Even if your webhost doesn't let you use mod_rewrite, you can get nice URL with a simple hack. Mosty webhosts let you configure custom error pages. That means, if a visitors tries to access a page that doesn't exist, you can show him your special 404 page instead of the apache default.
We will use this for our permalinks. If you enable permalinks and mod_rewrite doesn't work, all you'll see is a 404 page. We'll now create custom error handlers for 404 to display index.php instead. Every time a visitor opens a permalink, he will trigger this custom error handler and he'll see the correct site. Wordpress doesn't care, if mod_rewrite or our custom error handler has redirected this user.
All you need to do is this:
Switch Wordpress to your preferred permalink structure.
Either write this into your .htaccess file (and delete everything that was in there):
ErrorDocument 404 /index.php
ErrorDocument 403 /index.php
ErrorDocument 401 /index.php
or, if you have a management panel like confixx or syscp, you can configure error documents there:
You should add this to your index.php file, right after the <?php
in a new line
header( 'HTTP/1.1 200 OK' );
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Comments
That is quite clever! Thanks for that idea.
Are there any SEO disadvantages for this? Or is this take care of by the header( 'HTTP/1.1 200 OK' ); status?
Also, what happens, if someone actually should land at a 404 error page? Does this make all URLs valid?
The header() line overrides the 404 header the webserver sends.
Well, I'm not sure if this makes all pages valid. Wordpress still send a 404 error page to the user and an additional Status: 404 header. Not sure how crawlers react on this.