Setting up GoDaddy, WordPress, permalinks and mod_rewrite
Well, I know it is still my first day setting this thing up, but needless to say Google has received a lot of hits because of me. I am not a Linux guy because it really is just too much for me. It is a nice system with a lot of cool open source bells and whistles, but it I would never use it at work, therefore I don’t use it outside either.
GoDaddy lets me sign up for dirt cheap to host for a few years on Linux with PHP support. I needed the PHP support for WordPress (my current blogging tool)… so $3.95 a month later, here I am. Permalinks are a way to allow people to always link back to a post, so I think they should be clean and descriptive. http://blahblahblah.com/post/blah not http://blahblahblah.com/?id=24&lame=true. So I wanted to use the URI editor to create some sweet links. Problem one…
GoDaddy is fully automated. My site was up in 10 minutes and I was able to easily create the mySQL db and get WordPress up. Now came mod_rewrite…. when you have a url with querystring variables, a single page can process many links to display the same content. With the custom URI, you need to allow PHP to try to parse the “/” in http://blah.com/blah/blah/blah to create the querystring… strange, but very helpful. Supposedly search engines like it… the jury is still out for me on it. I think search engines have been out long enough to know how to spider querystring variables.
Blah… rambling. mod_rewrite is a way to handle this fun little issue with PHP. GoDaddy doesn’t support it, but there is a solution. Simple as creating a 404.php that mirrors my index.php file in your themes directory… that is it. When GoDaddy looks for a 404, it will find that file and process it. Because of that, the php page will render the post.
Slick, easy, word,
Matt
on March 25, 2006 at 1:49 pm
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I can not get comments to work with GoDaddy and WordPress, your 404 page will return you to the index, but will it allow comments?
on March 26, 2006 at 10:53 am
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Of course. You are doing it right now. =) I haven’t had any issues with this method.
Matt
on March 27, 2006 at 7:36 am
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For some reason, when I tried it, it didn’t work. Looked over your suggestion, other suggestion on the web and it didn’t work. I logged out as admin, and after some surfing went back and tried it again. It worked and the comments worked.
I don’t know if being logged in as admin had caused any initial problems, but it seemed to work after I logged out as admin and came back to the page later. Tried it on another webpage I am setting up and the same thing happened, worked after I logged out as admin. I am using WP 2.0.2.
It works now, and thank you for posting your information.