My permalink structure is set on default i.e. www.example.com/p=123, for those who don't know. I want to change this to www.example.com/postname as it is having a bad effect on my SEO. The problem is when I do change this the permalinks don't work. I have tried activating and deactivating plugins and everything. Any ideas as to what might be causing this?
I had the same problem and fount out it was due to my .htaccess file - If you have a blog already sucessfully set up, just try coping the .htaccess file over .... that worked for me anyway! Good luck!
I don't seem to have a .htaccess file I have created it as 1.htaccess and uploaded it. I then went to rename it as .htaccess but it won't save it as that as it claims it to be an invalid file name. Any ideas?
This is not quite true. if he is using a custom permalink structure and if the the user running httpd does not have write access to .htaccess, then he will have to update .htaccess manually.
Yeah, it seems like your .htaccess does not have the proper permissions for wordpress to update. Either set the permissions correctly or manually do it.
Thanks for the help guys. But how do I change the permissions. Is there somewhere that will guid em through this. I have been to the wordpress site and it has a guide that was useful until it came to saving the file as .htaccess. It just won't allow me to save the file as .htaccess. it keeps telling me that it is an invalid file name.
What FTP software do you use? You should be able to right click the file in the FTP software and change the permissions from there.
I'm using core FTP. I then tired it through the web-based version at my hosts site, but came up with the same thing.
Try it with smart ftp, I know it works in there. Or if you're interested I could probably fix it for you.
I had downloaded filezilla and that didn't work and then downloaded smart ftp but only had it installed and had to head to work and didn't get the time to try it. How could you fix it for me?