[wp-hackers] Rewrite hacking/recreation

[Eric A. Meyer]

At 7:40 PM -0800 1/31/07, Matt Mullenweg wrote:
>Eric A. Meyer wrote:
>>     So in the end, thanks to an oldish post from Alex King, I found 
>>a solution to WordPress' aggressive 404ing and thus solved both of 
>>the above problems:  I commented out lines 35-135 of classes.php. 
>>Now my feeds don't return files with 404 headers, and the main page 
>>of my archive actually displays the intended content instead of a 
>>WP 404. Furthermore, any legitimate 404s with my WP directory 
>>trigger a serve of the Apache-defined 404 page, not WP's.
>
>Yes, especially since modifying core code is a really bad idea.

    I'm assuming the "yes" is in response to my suggestion that a hook 
or option be created.  I would certainly love to see that happen, 
because believe me, I'm not at all happy about modifying a core file. 
It will clearly make future upgrading a much bigger pain in the neck, 
which will make me less likely to do it, which is bad.  I'll also 
have to check my .htaccess file every time I upgrade to make sure WP 
didn't add its mod_rewrite.c stuff again, since I had to comment that 
out as well.  Bleah.
    I think that having a simple way to bypass WP's code in this area 
(both rewriting and 404-type error handling) would be good enough for 
cases like mine.  That way WP users who who already have those set up 
on an older site with a less capable CMS and are interested in 
upgrading to WP, or just generally want to rely on their web server 
for HTTP error pages and would rather set up their own rewrites, can 
do so without worrying about their in-place systems fighting with 
WP's internals.

-- 
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/