Apache and htaccess are an amazing combination. Many write that the use of htaccess is a performance bottleneck, but I find that the facilities it exposes change the way that I build sites, and enables far more efficient solutions that I would otherwise have to produce.
I have changed permalinks in wordpress to be pretty. What immediately resulted was a 403: Forbidden.
Well, what really happens when you change permalinks is that wordpress creates a .htaccess file to do some URL re-writing. But often apache security does not allow re-writes, due to FollowSymLinks not being enabled… Don’t ask.. The magic incantation is to add “Options +FollowSymLinks” to that wordpress generated .htaccess file, at the start preferebly.
