Lesson learned: WordPress re-writes part of your .htacess file every now and again, namely, the part between the “BEGIN WordPress” and “END WordPress” comments. So, you know, you shouldn’t put your own rewrite rules in between them, or you’ll wonder why they keep going missing.
As I’ve mentioned here before, I upgraded to Movable Type 4 not too long ago. One of the changes that almost went unnoticed is the way archives are handled. In MT3, I wasn’t using the dynamic pages, so every post was generated into a file in the archives directory. For example, a post about new music in July wound up at /archives/2007/07/new_music.php.
In MT4 - or at least, MT4 with dynamic pages - there is no archives directory. Really, there aren’t any directories, since it’s all handled by mod_rewrite, but that’s not really the point I’m making. Under MT4, that post I mentioned above would be at /2007/07/new_music.php, with no /archives at the front.
Now, I could change the Archive Mapping on the Entry Archive Template in the admin, but I kind of like the shorter URLs. I don’t know much about mod_rewrite, but I found an answer a lot quicker than I expected to, thanks to askApache. I just added this to the .htaccess file in my site root, and now any requests to the non-existent archives directory are re-directed back into the root.
RedirectMatch ^/archives/(.*)$ http://www.brockli.com/$1
If you want to use this for your site, you’ll need to replace brockli.com with your own URL, but that should be it.
