Jarrod Trainque

8Jan

Yahoo’s Permalinks plugin for Wordpress not working; help requested

Posted 2 years, 10 months ago - 5 comments

So I recently moved my blog from http://trainque.com to http://m.iscellaneo.us. Around the same time, Yahoo Webhosting announced that it would make Wordpress available as a blogging tool through an official partnership.

I’ve been using Yahoo Webhosting for nearly 3 years now, and generally the service has been great. They offer regular site snapshot of your files, have rather good tech support, and aren’t likely to suffer from a devastating viral attack that’s cause you to lose all your files.

The downside of Yahoo Webshosting is that they don’t let you really get into the guts of your server, for obvious reasons. This means that some functionality is limited.

Take your .htaccess file, for example. This is a “hidden” file that sits on your server and allows you to run mod-rewrite rules, letting you customize URLs for your site. In other words, .htaccess let’s you change your permalinks from something like http://yoursite.com/index.php?q=132 to http://yoursite.com/articles/article_name.

The problem is that Yahoo Webhosting doesn’t let you change, access, or even see .htaccess, so Wordpress users cannot take advantage of permalink re-writing.

Or so I thought… As I mentioned, Yahoo recently formed a partnership with Wordpress. What this means is that through Yahoo’s control panel, you can one-click install Wordpress on your site.

It’s not a completely standard install of Wordpress, though, as there are extra tables created in the database allowing Yahoo do stuff that’s external to a normal install of Wordpress.

Here’s where it gets interesting. The Yahoo installation of Wordpress comes bundled with a small plugin called “Customizable Permalinks”. The author is “Yahoo! WebHosting”.

Here’s what’s in the file:

function update_permalink_file() {
if (isset($_POST[’permalink_structure’]) ) {
if(empty($_POST[’permalink_structure’]) ) {
unlink(get_home_path() . ‘.plink’);
} else {
touch(get_home_path() . ‘.plink’);
}
}
if(strcmp($_GET[’deactivate’],”true”)==0){
unlink(get_home_path() . ‘.plink’);
} else if(strcmp($_GET[’activate’],”true”)==0){
touch(get_home_path() . ‘.plink’);
}
unlink(get_home_path() . ‘.htaccess’);
}
// Now we set that function up to execute when the admin_footer action is called
add_filter(’mod_rewrite_rules’, ‘update_permalink_file’);
add_action(’mod_rewrite_rules’, ‘update_permalink_file’);

Seems simple enough. But alas, I cannot get customizable permalinks to work.

First, I have my blog at http://m.iscellane.us. Technically, my files live at http://trainque.com/miscellaneous, but I’m using the subdomain “m” at http://iscellaneo.us to point to http://trainque.com/miscellaneous.

My suspicion is that this plugin probably requires on of the following:

  1. that the blog be located at the root of a site (e.g. http://site.com), or
  2. that the plugin won’t work for subdomains, or
  3. that the plugin can’t find the .htaccess file based on my configuration.
  4. that the plugin resquires a Yahoo-flavored install of Wordpress, not a self-install.

I installed a Yahoo-flavored version of Wordpress, to try to rule out #4 above, but the permalink function does seem to work in a “proper” Yahoo install either. The test install was made in subfolder, so #1 above could still be the culprit.

I know enough PHP to follow the plugin in terms of what it’s doing (I think), but I’m not sure I know enough about Wordpress’s native functions to completely troubleshoot. Sadly, Yahoo’s documentation on this plugin seems to be missing (the URI in the plugin simply points to http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/webhosting/).

If there’s anyone out there that’s experienced this (and was able to resolve this), or can point me to the right direction, it would be much appreciated.

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5 Comments

  1. Comment by Jarrod — January 18, 2006 @ 3:04 pm

    I was able to get it to work (sortof) by using Yahoo’s Wordpress installer to set up a secondary blog, migrating the database contents, and changing DNS settings so that http://m.iscellaneo.us now points to the subfolder. Not sure why, but Yahoo Permalink plugin works fine when you use the Yahoo blog installer, but doesn’t work on a custom individually installed version of Wordpress.

  2. Comment by Amar Galla — February 16, 2006 @ 1:21 pm

    It does work with Yahoo. You cannot edit or create a .htaccess file with yahoo, but if you go through the wordpress filemanager, you can edit the file and add the required changes. I managed to do it with my Yahoo Wordpress account.

  3. Comment by Vlad — August 8, 2006 @ 11:59 am

    I don’t even see the WrodPress installation at yahoo anymore. I having the same problem with permalinks. Just for the future reader. If you choose a provider for WP look for ones that offer “fantastico” scripts. If they do, you probably will not need to even touch .htaccess for your customized permalinks to work.

  4. Comment by Dave Q — December 3, 2006 @ 9:44 pm

    I’m also a Yahoo! Hosting customer. Everything seems to work now including the customizable permalink plugin. My only beef with Yahoo is that I can’t get Google sitemaps to work because it always give an error 404/500. http://dev.trevoca.com/sitemap.xml

    any suggestions?

  5. Comment by Travis — October 11, 2008 @ 9:52 pm

    Change your link structure to /index.php/%postname%/

    Downside is you’ll have index.php showing on each page. Upside your post name isn’t lonely after your domain.

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