404 error on all pages except home page [closed]

Question

For no apparent reason, my wife's blog is only available on the homepage (i.e. the top domain). None of the posts or categories are available and I get a 404 error (a server 404 not a wordpress 404) when I try.

I've done some googling and tried several solutions that worked for others:

• I tried switching the permalinks to default and back. When the permalinks are on default, the posts work again but the categories still don't work. But when I switch back to %postname% permalinks, the posts go back to not working.
• I tried deactivating the plugins.
• I also tried updating wordpress.
• I tried changing the permissions on my .htaccess file to 666.

I've seen this: After server migration only the homepage works

And this: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/help-only-homepage-works-all-other-links-404

Could be something to do with mod_rewrite? This is a little beyond me... Not sure how to proceed. Anyone have any ideas?

Answer 1

Well, there are a variety of reasons this could be happening. Since this is 404, it should also tell you what file is missing, so please do provide that information. Otherwise, the answer is quite obvious. WordPress uses index.php for all actions regarding to pages by simply using $_GET (index.php?p=12314 etc) so therefore if home page works and other pages don't, it might be mod_rewrite indeed, which for some reason thinks that pages like site.com/page are actually folders and not affiliated with index.php.

Maybe backup database and make a clean install? Or try the following code instead (found from the WordPress site itself)

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

If none of those work for you, I'd suggest you to turn to your service provider as they might be having difficulties with serving the mod_rewrite possibility.