boakes.org

For some reason, ever since I upgraded to WordPress 2.0, the categories on this site haven’t been working. I’ve now upgraded to 2.0.1 and they’re still not happy. I had hoped that the upgrade would help… but alas…

Long ago I took the decision to use the shortest URL fomat possible, which is why you see pages from “boakes.org” not “www.boakes.org” and critically, why each story isn’t hidden away in an impossible directory structure like “/this/that/here/there/” it’s just “boakes.org/postname“, simple.

Well, it should be simple, and it’s worked up until now; but something’s clashing with the category names and I can’t spot what it is. Previously, wordpress made heavy use of mod_rewrite, but that doesn’t seem to be the case any more, so it’s gone from the voodoo art of url re-writing (which is complex, but documented) to a more proprietary format, it would seem, which appears to be too cutting edge to be well documented.

This then, shall grow into a solution, once I find it, or as soon as someone offers a little wizdom. In the mean time, I’m afraid the categories are temporarily bent out of shape, so please use the search instead.

FWIW, the “custom structure” in use is “/%postname%” and the category base is “/category“.

Wordpress Categories Fixed

The problem, it turns out, was to do with a redirect plugin I had forgotten I was using. I diagnosed the issue by downloading the latest version, then adding an extra header so that I could be sure it was the output from the plugin that was doing the redirect. With the plugin disabled, categories are once again working like a charm.

Originally I’d instaled the plugin to ensure the folk who requested pages using “the old system” of (for example) http://boakes.org/index.php?p=222 would get redirected to the approriate “nice” permalink of http://boakes.org/ameri-who. This also ensures that any search engines don’t get confused and think the content is duplicated.

It seems that with the upgrade to 2.0, and with my particular setup, the plugin is a bit broken. Hopefully there’ll be another bugfix along soon and it’ll all play nicely again. It may, in fact, already handle this specific case through a passthough mechanism that’s recently been added, but it’s not exactly clear yet if this is the case - time, and experimentation, will tell.