[wp-hackers] Rewrite hacking/recreation

[Eric A. Meyer]

At 4:00 PM -0500 1/29/07, Mark Jaquith wrote:

>Are you sure you've tried it with:
>
>	(1) the rewrite rule placed before the WP block
>	(2) rewriting to /index.php/foo/?whatever=blah (as opposed to 
>/foo/?whatever=blah
>	(3) [QSA,L]

    #3 helped fix a number of my problems, at least in terms of 
returning the actual pages required (HTTP headers may be another 
matter).  For example, 
<http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/recent-links/> works now, as 
opposed to before, when it rewrote to the home page of the site 
rather than show the results of my PHP script.
    Sadly, I still have a couple of problems that won't go away:

    1. The feeds, while they exist and are all working now (hooray!), 
also get the server to return a 404 header, which seems bad.  I'm 
pretty sure that's WP's doing, though I can't be absolutely certain. 
See the results at 
<http://feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fmeyerweb.com%2Feric%2Fthoughts%2Frecent-links%2Frss2> 
as one example.  If you then go to 
<http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/recent-links/rss2> in a browser or 
aggregator, you see the RSS file.  (Unless your aggregator is really, 
really respectful of HTTP headers and won't load anaything reported 
to be a 404.)
    I'm kind of afraid that WP is spitting back a bunch of 404s, so 
that browsers  and search engines think every page in my blog is a 
404 page.  That would be kind of icky.

    2. <http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/> returns a plain old 
WP-generated 404.  I know it's not Apache doing this, because it's 
supposed to serve up a completely different 404 page than the one WP 
generates.  What I believe to be the related rewrite is:

    RewriteRule ^eric/thoughts/$ /eric/thoughts/index.php [QSA,L]

I'm assuming that #2 above has some bearing on this, or maybe it has 
to do with Alex's observations, but shut my mouth and paint me red if 
know how.
    I also have a whole bunch of pretty-permalink rewriting I did on 
my own back in the day, and which I assume I could drop now. 
Hopefully I will, once I sort the rest of this stuff out...

    3. Any 404 on my site (like <http://meyerweb.com/kuhwfs>) now 
rewrites to the home page, in flagrant violation of my .htaccess 
file, where I define site-wide error pages.  I find this to be 
entirely uncool.  How do I stop it?  Change the mod_rewrite stuff for 
WP to have a different base than the site's root?

-- 
Eric A. Meyer  (eric at meyerweb.com)
Principal, Complex Spiral Consulting   http://complexspiral.com/
"CSS: The Definitive Guide," "CSS2.0 Programmer's Reference,"
"Eric Meyer on CSS," and more    http://meyerweb.com/eric/books/