Layered Thoughts

Problem

When you’re developing locally for a client, you want to try and replicate the server environment as closely as possible. That’s why using tools like WAMP are so great because they provide you with a pretty much stock version of a typical server setup that will work for 99% of use cases when it comes to developing and deploying a Wordpress site. But sometimes, things break. And when they break, they don’t make sense.

A perfect example is using a default install of WAMP and trying to setup “Pretty Permalinks” with Wordpress. An example of pretty permalinks is setting your permalinks to /%postname%/ instead of the standard www.domain.com/p?=23. Obviously a favorable setup for SEO and usability.

But if you were to set the permalinks to that with a default WAMP install, your site will start throwing up 404 pages for all pages that are linked to with the new permalinks. The problem is that mod_rewrite is not turned on by default with WAMP, so Apache is incapable of rewriting URLs according to .htaccess rules that Wordpress sets when you modify your permalinks.

Solution

Click to Enlarge

In your taskbar in the bottom right of the screen in windows, left click the WAMP icon, go to Apache, then Apache Modules, then make sure that “rewrite_module” is checked. Checking that will automatically restart WAMP and will activate mod_rewrite, allowing you to modify your permalinks however you want while not breaking anything!

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