Problems with 404, .htaccess, permalinks and Wordpress custom posts locally on Snow Leopard

Question

I have a custom "about" post:

function about_register() {
        $labels = array(
            'name' => _x('About Page', 'post type general name'),
            'singular_name' => _x('About Item', 'post type singular name'),
            'add_new' => _x('Add New', 'About Item'),
            'add_new_item' => __('Add New About Item'),
            'edit_item' => __('Edit About Item'),
            'new_item' => __('New About Item'),
            'view_item' => __('View About Item'),
            'search_items' => __('Search Team'),
            'not_found' =>  __('Nothing found'),
            'not_found_in_trash' => __('Nothing found in Trash'),
            'parent_item_colon' => ''
        );

        $args = array(
            'labels' => $labels,
            'public' => true,
            'publicly_queryable' => true,
            'show_ui' => true,
            'query_var' => true,
            'rewrite' => true,
            'capability_type' => 'post',
            'hierarchical' => false,
            'menu_position' => null,
            'has_archive' => 'about',
            'supports' => array('title','thumbnail')
        );

        register_post_type( 'custom_about_post' , $args );
    }

I created a page called archive-about.php and put my Wordpress loop in there and pulled up my custom meta information.

However, when I go to mysite.com/about I get a 404 error.

Searching the internet -

I went to my permalinks page and tried to flush rewrite rules by hitting save.

I was instructed to put the following into my sites .htaccess file:

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

# END WordPress

However, when I did this my entire site is now 403! If I remove this and leave my .htaccess file blank my site returns...but the link

localhost/mysite/about/ 

still doesn't work.

In order to make the archives work, do I use the default settings in permalinks or something else?

What should I be setting my rewrite rules to in Mac OSX (snow leopard) to run Wordpress locally?

Is there something wrong in the code posted above?

Answer 1

You named the custom post type 'custom_about_post' not 'about'. Rename the archive template to archive-custom_about_post.php or better: rename the post type.

As a rule of thumb: Avoid underscores in post type names. There are/were some issues, especially with templates.

And why do you need a custom post type just for about pages? What’s your goal?

Answer 2

1. Permalinks has to be set to something other than default.

2. Maybe because I was on a Mac I had to set the following in my .htaccess file to get rid of the 403 error:

   Options +FollowSymLinks

So the entire rewrite file is:

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

Answer 3

As register_post_type shows, the rewrite argument is used incorrectly in your case. It has to be an array probably. The slug key would let you set your slug to about as required.

function about_register() {
    $args = array(
        ...
        'has_archive' => true,
        'rewrite' => array( 'slug' => 'about' ),
        'supports' => array('title','thumbnail' )
    );

    register_post_type( 'custom_about_post' , $args );
}

Otherwise, as per:

...true and use post type as slug...

...your slug is being overridden.