Add words to your blog post address (permalinks)

Feb 29, 2008

Add words to your blog post address (permalinks)

NOTE! If you enjoy this post, please feel free to share and twitter it with the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/yonq5w . Thanks, I appreciate it!

Benefits of this lesson:

You can get rid of the "?" that’s the default in all Wordpress installations.

By default, Wordpress will offer links to your blog postings rather weirdly - they’ll look like:

http://www.yourblog.com/?p=1

This is easily fixable, however! And you really do want to do this - people are more comfortable with site addresses that looks like real words and not punctuation. You can change the above to things like:

http://www.yourblog.com/2009/04/21/beginners-lesson-5-add-words-to-your-blog (this uses the date format)
http://www.yourblog.com/comments/beginners-lesson-5-add-words-to-your-blog (this uses an anchor of "comments")
http://www.yourblog.com/my-views/beginners-lesson-5-add-words-to-your-blog (this uses an anchor of "my-views").

etc. It’s very easy to do! Here’s how.

DO THIS FIRST)

Read Beginners Lesson 3 and make sure you’ve set up a local directory where you keep files for your blog.
Know how to access your Wordpress dashboard (username/passwd).
Make sure you can upload the file .htacess to your blog wordpress root directory OR directly edit your .htaccess from your site control panel.

Step 1.) Visit your Wordpress Dashboard and click on

Options | Permalinks

You’ll see something like:

Permalinks

Now, many people choose the date option. I myself prefer being more creative, and will go with a descriptive phrase for my permalinks like

comments
answers
etc.

If you do go with a custom structure, remember, you NEED the /%postname%/ tag following your custom setup. Your blog won’t work without it.

Step 2.) Select your permalink structure

Once you’ve decided what you’d like to use, click on the button Update Permalink Structure. If your .htaccess file isn’t writeable, you’ll be prompted to put the following in it by hand:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

Highlight that information and press <control>C (the control key and the "C" key together). This will copy those lines to your computer memory.

Step 3.) Open your .htaccess file either on your site control panel or on your local computer.

Here is where you need to pay attention. If you can access your blog domain via a control panel, do so and see if you have a .htaccess file in your blog root directory (default location would be http://www.yourdomain.com/wordpress). If you do not have one, open a new text file via NOTEPAD like so:

notepad .htaccess

A blank file will pop up.

Step 4.) Paste the above contents into your .htaccess file.

Click to activate your notepad window, and then press <control>V (the control key and the "V" key together). This will paste the contents in. Save the file in your local blog folder (refer to Lesson 3 for information about that).

Step 5.) Upload the .htaccess file (or save the .htaccess file if you’re using a control panel window) to your blog root directory.

Drag and drop the .htaccess file to your blog root directory. Then click on a link from within your blog - you should see the new permalinks structure working beautifully. And if you’d prefer to use a plugin to do this, check out Auto Permalinks Wordpress Plugin - it will do it for you.

And that’s all there is to it.

ThankYouVeryMuch!

Owlbert

(By the way, if you have any questions about the topics in this posting "Add words to your blog post address (permalinks)", do comment below - I'll try to clarify any issues).

Barbara Ling and Owlbert

If you find this blog posting useful, please feel free to share it below. And do feel free to let your friends know about it as well....I very much appreciate your time!