Have you tried resetting the forum permalink – on the WP Integration admin panel?

dont want to sound like a nube but I guess I am with this plugin. How do I reset? Or what do I reset it to? Im lookingat Intergration > Page and Permalink > “…our-firm/forum.htm”. Other options are just other pages and the blog within the site.

so if you go to the forum – integration – page and permalink admin panel for simple press, in the left column, about in the middle is a button that says ‘Update Forum Permalink’… click on it… see image below

Yes, I did that a few times, but still the same result.

OK – well there are many reasons for 404s which just means that the urls can not be found.

So let’s start with some basic questions…

Are you using any sort of redirection plugin (such as ‘Permalink Redirect’ for example) or the ‘Yoast SEO’ plugin?

Have you ever had another forum installed on the site that may have left a sub-folder called ‘forum’ behind?

And a link to your forum page might prove useful…

Ah.. it might be that .htm being appended. I assume that is being done by some plugin and it is quite probably not taking into account the SP rewrite rules that are added to the WP rules.

Not sure I understand why you would want to add a false .htm to each url but – well – it is there. What plugin doing that please?

It could be that. I “inherited” this site and the following were installed for some unknown reason:

.htm on PAGES

Redirection

I don’t have a problem deactivating Redirection, but I do with .htm due to current SEO – I think. So I deactivated Redirection and I still get the same thing which makes me think it’s go to by .htm

here’s the link: http://www.thecfoconnection.com/our-firm/forum.htm

here’s the .htaccess file

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index.php$ – [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

It is definitely the htm extension that is the cause.

about the only thing we can try is to make a small edit to the plugin code to circumvent it affecting the forum. Are you willing to try that?

In the interest of saving time, I deactivated the .htm PAGES plugin and updated the forum permalink but that didn’t work either. The page URL changed from …/our-firm/forum.htm to …/our-firm/forum/ on refresh.

On Mac in Safari I could at least see the forum (…/forum/); on PC in Explorer 9 I could see the page but not the group: “The requested roup does not exist or you do no have permission to view it.” and below that “Unread and recently updated topics” and “There were no topics found”

I activated .htm PAGES again and all is as it was before – forum goes to 404 error – but now I still cannot see the forum on the .htm page in Windows/IE9 (it displays okay on Mac/Safari 5.1)

Redirect is still deactivated for now.

Other questionable plugins: Exec-PHP, All In One SEO Pack by Michael Torbert

Yeah, I figured that would be the case. Yes, I’m willing.

Yes, I’m definitely willing to do that.

That, I am afraid, is going to be a separate issue and probably just a permissions thing which we can address. It really has nothing to do with the .htm question.

But I am a little confused as the copy of the plugin I have seen (version 1.1) is called ‘html on pages’ and places the full .html extension on the urls…

At the top of that plugin – I believe it has just the one php file – you should find these lines of code:

add_action('init', 'html_page_permalink', -1);
register_activation_hook(__FILE__, 'active');
register_deactivation_hook(__FILE__, 'deactive');

Change them like this:

if ( ! sp_is_forumpage() ) {
    add_action('init', 'html_page_permalink', -1);
    register_activation_hook(__FILE__, 'active');
    register_deactivation_hook(__FILE__, 'deactive');
}

let’s see if that resolves it…