[wp-hackers] Apache/mod_rewrite and Permalinks

[Louis McCoy]

Hey everyone.

So last night I killed a kitten when I hacked core. I know, I'm sorry. Now
that I have a minute to solve the problem properly, I wanted to turn to
people smarter than me (you guys) for advice / help. On one of my servers, I
had just installed WordPress 3.0.1 to set up a new site for a client. I went
to go set up Permalinks, and I was met with a blank page. Being a new
install, there aren't any plugins for me to disable, so I turned to google
(like ya do) for answers.

I found this thread:
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/blank-permalink-admin-page-after-changing-permalink-type

And tried the whole deleting / changing the permalink setting from inside
the wp database to no avail. But, at the (almost) end of the thread, *zeniph
*posts some code for hacking core that solves the problem. Understanding
that this is TERRIBLE, I was out of time and did it on the offchance that it
would work - lo and behold, I have access to the Permalinks page again.

So since the code forces mod_rewrite to be detected, clearly the problem
lies with either my build of Apache and reporting mod_rewrite, or with
wordpress detecting mod_rewrite wrong. Has anyone else experienced this
issue, or have any insight? Is this maybe a bug relating to a specific
version of apache / php?

FWIW, I'm running Apache 2.2.16 and PHP 5.3.3 and yes, mod_rewrite is
installed.

Thanks so much!

-Louie