problem with .htaccess file

[kah22]

His guys I wonder if someone can help me out here. The situation is this.

I’m changing one of my sites to a blog outlay – it’s the first time I’ve tried a blog and I’ve opted for WordPress.

When I set up my theme down the right hand column is an Page entitled ‘About,’ a place to put a little bit about myself. I think if you want to build up confidence a bio is a must. However I don’t like the naming process.

When I edit the page info with my bio the address in my web-browser reads something like this www.mydomain.com/blog/ ?page_id=2 – not the most interesting or informative name you could have, I’m sure you’d agree. So how would I go about changing the ‘?page_id=2’ to something like ‘about_kevin.’

I inserted another page called ‘about my site,’ and it also threw up a strange name e.g. ?page_id=3

I've tried putting /%postname% into the Custom Structure of Permalink. When I check on my about page the url comes up in my address bar as www.mydomain.com/news/about but the file displays a 404 Not Found Message.

It has been suggested that I update my .htaccess file (have the info as to what to change) but I can't find it to change it!! Any suggestions as to where it might be?

Using Dreamweaver 8 I've went into my online folder but can't see anything there.

Many thanks for any help

Kevin

[atsw]

Originally Posted by kah22

It has been suggested that I update my .htaccess file (have the info as to what to change) but I can't find it to change it!! Any suggestions as to where it might be?

Can't help on most of your post, but with regard to the .htaccess file, this is a special type of system file. Files that start with a 'dot' are hidden from a normal file listings to prevent their accidental deletion.

You'll need to use a Server Side flag of "-a" on your list command to see the file. If you log into your Webspace with an FTP client, simply set the '-a' flag in the section where you can specify filters. Often you have to tick a box saying you want to enable server side filters, and then set the filter as '-a' (no ticks, just -a). From this point the LIST command will show all files.

Not sure how you do this in Dreamweaver, sorry!

Andrew

[kah22]

Here is a follow up:

I’ve been fiddling around here trying to sort out this naming process and discovered the following:

If I use /%postname%/ or any of the other variations of that e.g. /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ then nothing happens I get the 404 file not found message.

However if I use the following
/index.php/%postname%/ then I get the following:

http://www.mydomain.com/news/index.php/about/ - almost but not quite what I want.

The whole problem seems to be with the latter part of the address it looks like index.php has to be in there – I don’t understand why but if it is search engine friendly I don’t mind leaving it like that.

As a by the way my blog rests in a subfolder ie. www.mydomain.com/news/

Any comments
Kevin

[segedunum]

I'm not exactly an expert on Wordpress, but the URLs are basically page IDs that are used to retrieve stored data and to tell Wordpress what page and template to display. Whether you get nicer naming conventions for URLs is entirely up to Wordpress really.

I'd recommend having a look at the Wordpress documentation, and specifically, URL rewriting:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

Look at the 'almost pretty' permalinks, which is what I believe you're trying to get there:

http://example.com/index.php/yyyy/mm/dd/post-name/

Have a good read through here, and this should get you what you want. You can do a little bit of hacking and get some ultra pretty looking URLs, or you can get something reasonable that looks more logical.