Some things I’ve discovered about WordPress V2:

  • Use the internal editor to edit your .htaccess. If you do it outside WP, appparently you lose your changes the next time you do ANY editing or posting. Seems like a bug that it resaves the .htaccess each time you post or edit a post. Dunno.

  • This ends up being problematic, because if you mess up the .htaccess, you could get a 500 internal server error, preventing you from fixing the problem.
  • Toggle your .htaccess from Anyone Can Write to No One Can Write, if you need custom changes. WordPress by design overwrites this file whenever you do anything. This means when you change an option, post something, or edit something. It’s really stupid.
  • Make sure you set your blog address/wordpress address in the Options->General section.
  • Make sure your hosting provider or your .htaccess restrict to accessing this url. For example, if you have your address at http://www.foo.com/, make sure people cannot access or are redirected when they go to http://foo.com/, and vice versa. This solves a lot of problems with ajax stuff.
  • The rich editor is really nice, but if you have a lot of content and a lot of nested divs, sometimes it will incorrectly parse them and try to close what’s already been closed. Use that feature with caution if you handcode your html, frequently.

For the .htaccess stuff, the following may be pasted to provide redirection. Use option 1 or 2 depending on your needs. This will only work if your host has mod_rewrite. You may need to put “RewriteEngine On” before the RewriteCond lines.
(Pretty much stolen from here):

#Option 1 Redirects domain.com to www.domain.com
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.domain\.name [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^$
RewriteRule ^/(.*) http://www.domain.name/$1 [L,R]

# Option 2 Redirects www.domain.com to domain.com
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.domain\.name [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^$
RewriteRule ^/(.*) http://domain.name/$1 [L,R]

Note that for wp2, you should make sure you have a way of deleting/modifying your .htaccess file in case you screw something up. If you try to edit the .htaccess outside of wordpress, wordpress2 won’t know about the changes and will overwrite them so you need to use the Manage->Files section to edit. However, if you break your rewrite because you mis-pasted, you’ll need a way to revert that doesn’t involve WP2.