WordPress Permalinks.

WordPress Permalinks, How To Set Them Up!

Depending on how you installed WordPress, either by downloading from WordPress.org or by using the Fantastico that comes with your web hosting cpanel, the first thing you should do is

—–>manual installation is change your password and then set your permalinks

and for the

—–>Fantastico installation, set your permalinks.

The reason for this is the permalinks are the URLs for every post and page on your WordPress site/blog and need to be set before you post anything to your site.

To do this you go to Settings and then Permalinks.  You will see several options.

Default                  http://youriste.com/?p=123
Day and name     http://yoursite.com/2008/11/23/sample-post/
Month and name     http://yoursitecom/2008/11/sample-post/
Numeric                 http://yoursite.com/archives/123
Custom Structure        /%postname%/

When you choose Custom Structure, after you update you may get a message asking you to update the .htaccess with the code that is then supplied.

If you use Hostgator for your web hosting then you may never have heard of a file called .htaccess and you can ignore the next bit.

If you do  need to update the .htaccess then, what you will have to do is copy the code and paste it into Notepad and save as .htaccess, that is [dot]htaccess, the actual dot on your keyboard not the word or the brackets and save as a .txt file.

Now you will need to upload the .htaccess.txt to your site via your ftp client.  Then rename the file to .htaccess.php.

Now go back to your Dashboard and click on View Site to see if the new permalink is working okay.  If it is not then back to your ftp client and right click on the .htaccess.php file and select properties and change the permissions to 666 or 777 then back to check out the permalink again. Now it should be http://yoursite.com/Hello World of course the last bit is Hello World as that is the only post on your site at the moment.

We are interested in the 5th type of permalink – Custom, because it allows us to define how we want the links to be organised.  There are a number of variables you can use to define your permalink structure:

%year%
The 4 digit year of the post
%monthnum%
Month of the year
%day%
Day of the month
%hour%
Hour of the day
%minute%
Minute of the hour
%second%
Second of the minute
%postname%
The name of the post (words separated by a dash)
%post_id%
The unique ID number of the post
%category%
The category of the post.
%author%
Author name.

You can combine these variables into a custom permalink structure.  Most of them are not very useful for an affiliate site.  What is useful to use is the %postname% and %category% variables.

Select , and enter the following:

/%category%/%postname%/

Scroll down and save your changes.  You can ignore the optional settings at the bottom.  Now, your posts will look something like:

http://mypetshop.com/dogs/beagle

Where beagle is the name of the post, and dogs is the category you posted it in.

Now you have your permalinks set, next is to change the Uncategorized category and work through the other options under the Settings.  I’ll cover that next.  So see you then, take care.