14 Dec 05 WordPress Permalinks with Custom 404 Page

As I mentioned in a previous post, WordPress installed on IIS can be somewhat aggravating because it doesn’t have permalink functionality out of the box. You have to jump through several hoops to get it to work. Mine works for the most part now, but it doesn’t work when you click the “next” link on pages that have large numbers of posts.

I’ve been thinking about a possible solution to this. Would it be possible to use a custom 404 page on IIS to act as a intermediary page that does what mod_rewrite would normally. Here’s how it would work:

1. Set IIS to redirect all 404 errors to a custom page that would handle all interpretation of the permalinks. In IIS, you have the option of specifying whether it i s a file, or a url. It must be set to “url” to work. Here’s a page that goes into this theory. http://evolvedcode.net/content/code_smart404/guide-rewrites.asp

2. All that would be left to do then would be to write a page that interpreted the rules that wordpress gives you and redirects accordingly.

Sorry if this was a little confusing, I’ll be trying this out in a week or so and I’ll let you know the results in a clearer format.