SEO Friendly WordPress URL’s on Namesco Zeus Servers

This blog was moved a while ago to a Namesco server and it has been an amazingly reliable service compared to the last one I had. Uptime has been 100% as far as I can tell, and the service is fast and easy to use.

However, one thing that was bothering me was not being able to change from the WordPress default URL’s because doing mod_rewrite through .htaccess doesn’t work on Zeus servers. YOu’ve got to use their rewrite.script to rewrite URL’s and I wasn’t sure where to start with that.

Last week, thanks to a comment from @andrewburnett on Twitter, I thought I would figure out how to solve the problem and get some friendly URL’s up there.

I tried a few different bits of code but this one was the one that worked, found in this WordPress forum post.

RULE_0_START:
# get the document root
map path into SCRATCH:DOCROOT from /
# initialize our variables
set SCRATCH:ORIG_URL = %{URL}
set SCRATCH:REQUEST_URI = %{URL}

# see if theres any queries in our URL
match URL into $ with ^(.*)\?(.*)$
if matched then
set SCRATCH:REQUEST_URI = $1
set SCRATCH:QUERY_STRING = $2
endif
RULE_0_END:

RULE_1_START:
# prepare to search for file, rewrite if its not found
set SCRATCH:REQUEST_FILENAME = %{SCRATCH:DOCROOT}
set SCRATCH:REQUEST_FILENAME . %{SCRATCH:REQUEST_URI}

# check to see if the file requested is an actual file or
# a directory with possibly an index.  don’t rewrite if so
look for file at %{SCRATCH:REQUEST_FILENAME}
if not exists then
look for dir at %{SCRATCH:REQUEST_FILENAME}
if not exists then
set URL = /index.php?q=%{SCRATCH:REQUEST_URI}
goto QSA_RULE_START
endif
endif

# if we made it here then its a file or dir and no rewrite
goto END
RULE_1_END:

QSA_RULE_START:
# append the query string if there was one originally
# the same as [QSA,L] for apache
match SCRATCH:ORIG_URL into % with \?(.*)$
if matched then
set URL = %{URL}&%{SCRATCH:QUERY_STRING}
endif
goto END
QSA_RULE_END:

The above goes in your file called rewrite.script in the root folder.

Once I did that I went to the WordPress settings > Permalinks and told it to do a custom structure permalink:

/%category%/%postname%/

The default permalink structures had went along the lines of /index.php/%category%/%postname%/ but this just wouldn’t work until I’d removed the index.php from the equation.

This might not work for everyone, but I just thought I’d relay the experience incase it can help someone out.