id26.comPersonal experience with technology

I’ve been using WordPress for a number of years and decided to switch my permalink structure. It originally was set to the default setting of ?p=100. I wanted to increase my SEO so I changed it to the current format Year / Month / Day / Post-Name. When I switch over, wordpress automatically created a .htaccess file in my webroot folder and locked me out of my website with a Forbidden Error.

Forbidden
 
You don't have permission to access / on this server.

The .htaccess file that was created looked like this.

< IfModule mod_rewrite.c >
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
< / IfModule >

After chatting with my web administrator, we came to the conclusion that FollowSymlinks in Apache was off be default. I needed to manually turn it on. The new .htaccess file looks like this.

< IfModule mod_rewrite.c >
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
< / IfModule >

Additional Links:

Apache RewriteEngine
WordPress Codex for Permalinks