How’s that for alliteration!?

I recently changed my portfolio/photography site over to a WordPress back end in order to easily update and maintain the content. One of the best things you can do for SEO with WordPress is to enable “pretty permalinks”. This means that your article URLs will all be more relevant to the content – rather than each post having an address like yoursite.com/?p=1234 they will instead have a more apt address like yoursite.com/2011/10/name-of-article. Now, this had never been an issue in the past, however I recently managed to break something.

On my photography site I like to password protect directories that have clients’ photos in them so that they can choose who has access to view the photos (by sending them a username and password). I simply arrange authentication with the .htaccess file in the directory. This has never really been an issue in the past either. Until, that is, I tried to use both pretty permalinks and password protected directories. Apparently WordPress doesn’t like you having your cake and eating it too (probably a good thing for the waistline).

Strangely, when you enable pretty permalinks in WordPress, you can’t access anything in .htaccess password protected directories. WordPress just shows up a 404 “Not Found” page, even though the directory exists. And it doesn’t matter if you include the file name either. Very frustrating. After quite a search, I finally found the solution. Hopefully this advice will find some poor soul before they migrate their whole WordPress database, only to discover that it hasn’t fixed the problem and decide to end their life by speeding past the nearest “Bridge Out Ahead” sign. The solution is quite simple:

1. Create an HTML document and call it “401.html” – it really doesn’t matter what the content of the page is, as long as it exists, so knock yourself out and fill the page with lolcats.
2. Create a folder in your root directory (usually public_html or wherever your main site lives) and upload the 401.html to the new directory (let’s call it “cake”).
3. Edit the .htaccess file in the password protected directory, and insert the following as the first line, before everything else in that file: “ErrorDocument 401 /cake/401.html”
4. Haz your cake and eat it, too!

P.S. Yes, I know I use en dashes incorrectly. Deal with it. Do as I say, not as I do.