Ok, so I know similar issues have been posted before but I have yet to find a solution.
I was foolishly messing around with plugins and my .htaccess last night and got myself into this pickle. Basically, I am on a linux server with mod_rewrite enabled. My wordpress installation was formerly using the /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ format. However, my .htaccess got screwy and now all those pages lead to a 404. As a temp fix, the default format of ?p=123 works to view the website, but I want to get back to the way things were.
My wp directory is 755 and the .htaccess file is 644. The htaccess is containing the default content from http://codex.wordpress.org/Permalinks. I have deleted, re-written, and tried every alternative of content in the htaccess that I could find but no matter what I can't get the original permalink setting to work. It doesn't seem that when I save the permalink settings WP will create a new .htaccess if one is not present and I am unsure if it is actually updating the file when needed as well.
Any ideas? Site is www.theamericanseam.com
.htaccessfile do you see a message telling you that the file is not writable? – s_ha_dum Jan 24 at 15:40