Wordpress, Mod_Rewrite, Search Engine Friendly URLs and NetFirms.com

I recently switched my hosting to NetFirms, as they are one of the few Canadian web hosting companies which allow you to host a number of domains on a single shared hosting account for free.

Netfirms does have its weaknesses though. Specifically, their mod_rewrite implementation is somewhat funky, resulting in almost every script needing a rewritten .htaccess file to get search engine friendly URLs working properly.

One script which has problems with Netfirms is Wordpress. If you are a Netfirms customer and can not get your Wordpress search engine friendly URLs to work properly, give the following .htaccess file a try

# BEGIN WordPress Netfirms HTAccess

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

#Forward domain.com to www.domain.com
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

#Setup Wordpress Rewriting
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !index.php
RewriteRule (.*) index.php/$1 [L]

# END WordPress

One weakness in the above .htaccess is domain.com/index.php is not automatically forwarded to domain.com/, which is important to make sure all pagerank is focused at a single location. I will be addressing this in some future post :)