Devolfamily

This is completely outdated now: needs update
Take a look up in the address bar. No more unsightly /index.php/2008/12/15/post-name up there anymore. Just sweet, sweet /%category%/%postname%/.

Super easy if I were smart and ran Apache instead of IIS. Maybe one day I’ll get around to moving my home server from windows to some flavor of linux. Who am I kidding, I’ve got a family, a job and mortgage … no way I’ll ever bother.

So, I’ve known about isapi rewrite filters for a long time but just kind of never bothered. And back when I first looked, the only big option was Helicon’s asapi rewrite which, unfortunately, the free lite version has too many limitations for what I wanted to do (not run rewrites on all of my websites). But this time around, when I just looked on a whim, I get Ionic’s IIRF which is free and runs on individual sites.

To setup I used this guy’s tutorial because it was the easiest to read. Not that there’s anything hard here, I just like really really easy when the kid is running around and the wife is asking me about Christmas decorations. In case the link goes away here’s the short version:

1. Download IIRF.
2. Unzip IIRF, copy out dll and copy, or create, an ini file in the same directory.
   Make sure the directory is readable by IIS worker process account.
3. Optional: create a directory that has write access for logging (which you turn on and off in the ini file).
4. Add the ISAPI filter to the website you want rewrites
5. Restart IIS to load the filter.
   I’m almost sure you could get away with recycling the app pool but not absolutely positive, and I haven’t tested it yet.
6. Setup your rewrite rules in the ini file.
   IIRF will dynamically load any changes in the ini file, no need to restart IIS/app pool.
7. In the WordPress control panel go to site Settings – Permalinks, choose Custom and then change how you want your links to look. Here’s the list of structure tags you can use.

Now, for the ini file. I copied this guy’s rewrite rules because he went that extra mile and thought about old links that might be out there. In the interest of full transparency, I haven’t looked at any of the documenation to understand the formatting of the rewrite rules and I’ve just copied the work of others. I don’t how to fix the rules to quit throwing errors in the log file, but they appear to work just fine. If I get a few minutes I might sit down and see what other cool stuff I’m missing that I could be doing. Oh, and I reserve the right to always be completely confused and only half understand what I’m talking about.

Next up is looking over htaccess rules for blocking hotlinking.

Here’s my rewrite file:

# Set logging directory and logging level
#RewriteLog : .out
#RewriteLogLevel 3

# Redirect url with index.php to url without
# throws errors about [R] but still works
RewriteRule ^/index.php(.*)$ /$1 [I,R=301]

# Rewrite for old url with date
# throws errors about [R] but still works
RewriteRule ^/(index.php/)*([1-2][0-9]{3})/([0-1][0-9])/([0-3][0-9])(.*)$ /$2/$3$5 [I,R=301]

# Normal wordpress redirect
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^/(?!index.php)(?!wp-)(.*)$ /index.php/$1

[update: Okay, I'll admit I'm not the smartest of the small brains, but I really should've recognized R=301 as a http status code. So now I'm curious why the guy I copied my rewrite rules from used a rewrite rule here instead of a redirect?]