WordPress URL problems continue

After my last entry, I thought I had Zinmasters all squared away. Unfortunately I was wrong:

Here are rewrite rules suggested by WordPress:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^archives/([0-9]{4})?/?([0-9]{1,2})?/?([0-9]{1,2})?([0-9]+)?/?$ /index.php?year=$1&monthnum=$2&day=$3&page=$4 [QSA]
RewriteRule ^archives/category/?(.*) /index.php?category_name=$1 [QSA]

The first one doesn’t work for some reason. I now know that the problem is on the right side of the rule. Anyway, I rewrote the output and it started working. And guess what. It also matches the left side of rule 2 although $1-$4 are empty. So all my category links broke as soon as the date links started working.

Lisa found this out today. Clearly I should start doing regression testing. ‘Twas easy enough to fix the problem by putting the category rule first, but it’s now clear that the rules suggested by WordPress are simply not to be trusted.

On a more serious note, none of the search engines actually seem to crawl the website when they come, even with the new URL patterns. Even with categories broken, Inktomi should have crawled the date driven pages yesterday.

I’m not too concerned just yet, we’re still twiddling things, but sooner or later we want searches to work.

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