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Controlling non-WordPress Subfolder Access with .htaccess

Published on February 16, 2008 4 Comments

WordPress users commonly use the built-in permalink redirection. This means that rather then having your new blog article’s URL look like “http://myblog.com/?p=78″, you make it look like this: “http://myblog.com/articles/my-article-title.” This feature means WordPress interprets the URL query of your blog and outputs the corresponding article.

This is great for readability and SEO, but what if you want to add a non-WordPress subfolder to your website with, say, a forum in it? If you make your forum address “http://myblog.com/forum/”, WordPress will try to interpret this URL. Not being able to find anything, you will get your blog’s 404 error page. Luckily, fixing this is easy.

If you are running on an Apache server, using a simple .htaccess file is all you need. If you aren’t too familiar with .htaccess, don’t worry about it. This is what you need to do:

First, create a file called htaccess.txt on your computer. In it, paste the following code:

# disable the rewrite engine
RewriteEngine off

This will tell your web server to disable the URL rewrite engine for the specified folder.

Second, upload this txt file to the subfolder on your domain that you don’t want WordPress to interpret. Finally, rename the file that you just uploaded to “.htaccess”, minus the quotes. Don’t forget the initial period.

And that’s all there is too it! Now you can have subfolders on your site without conflicting with the WordPress permalink structure.

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This article was written by John Kolbert on February 16, 2008 and filed as Tutorial/How-To. Get the latest articles by subscribing to the RSS feed. This article, including images and attachments, is property of John Kolbert and is not to be republished or translated without prior written permission.