[wp-hackers] Rewrite hacking/recreation

[Eric A. Meyer]

At 4:22 PM -0500 1/29/07, Eric A. Meyer wrote:

    Sorry to follow up on my own post, but I made some changes that 
alter claims made earlier.

>    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...
>    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.

    I checked in detail and most pages and feeds seem to be returning 
200s, so that's good.  The 404-response exceptions among the feeds 
are:

    <http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/rss2/summary/>
    <http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/rss2/full/>
    <http://meyerweb.com/eric/recent-links/rss2> (as mentioned above)

The other feeds (as listed on <http://meyerweb.com/feeds/>) work fine 
and return 200s; four are WP-generated, and two are not.

>    2. <http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/> returns a plain old 
>WP-generated 404.

    That's still a problem.  Sub-pages of the archive that depend on 
rewriting, like <http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2007/01/>, work 
just fine.  The archive index page WP-404s whether I try to rewrite 
it or not.

>    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...

    I tested dropping them, and I either got raw 404s or got WP to 
cough up the pages but using the main template, not the archive 
template.  So I put the rewrites back in, and commented out the WP 
rewrite block entirely.  After which...

>    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.

    Now that I've taken away the WP rewrite block in the .htaccess 
file, this is no longer an issue.  Non-WP 404s are served as they 
should be.  WP-404s are still served up from WP, which means I have 
two 404 pages, one of which tries to be helpful to the user (hint: 
it's not the WP one), and I still get a WP-404 on the main archive 
page.
    In all, kind of a Charlie Foxtrot situation.

-- 
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/