Well that’s a new one on me!

What does the ‘Redirection’ plugin do and how does it work?

The original front page of theme did not fit our needs, so we created a new page and made that the front page.  The Redirection plugin redirects users from that old front page, to the new one.  I tried using the wordpress “Static Front Page” option, but that didn’t seem to work.  I also tried using a simpler Redirection plugin, but it didn’t work either for re-directing the front page.  The redirection plugin is rather robust with lots of different options and things I don’t fully understand.

Well… WordPress keeps a tab on all the internal urls by what is known as rewrite rules. This is how SP can load all of it’s various and different urls into a single WP page. It almost sounds like these are getting cleared out by something from time to time and then not getting rewritten again properly.

You could try going to the forum admin > integration > page and permalink panel and manually clicking on update permalinks. This will cause a flush and rewrite of the rules. But of there IS some other party removing them then the problem may continue.

In amongst all of the options in this redirection plugin are there (1) any mention of rewrite rules and (2) anywhere where you can exclude specific urls or pages from its clutches? I may be wrong but this is where my suspicion is at the moment…

I do have a Caching plugin (quick Cache) that we use to clear the cache when we’re making updates and such.  Could that be causing the re-writing problem you are referring to?

In this caching plugin config there is a “No-Cache URI patterns” and a “No-Chache Referrer Patterns” that I have added the /forum/ page to. 

In the redirection plugin I do not see any mention of re-write rules.  As for the (2), there is only where to put the redirections you want, so by omission it should be excluding everything else I assume.  I do have /forums/ and /forums redirecting to the proper /forum/ 

Good call on the cache. That looks right. I doubt it messes with the rules – it would be most odd if it did. I actually tried this plugin quite recently and coudn’t get it working at all…

May I ask why you are redirecting the forum? Is this because you have changed the page slug or anything? Why not just change the slug to ‘forums’ if that is a preference? This could have something to do with it…

Although – there was a hint that this happens on non-forum pages from time to time as well which does suggest a more global issue.

I was redirecting forums to forum just because I saw some users typing in “forums,” but I’ll delete that redirect since most seem to click on the link to the forum.

But yeah, the 404s happen with non-forum pages, posts, forum topics, threads, general forums, and everything.  But it seems to happen most often with the forum pages and topics, which is what lead me here.  But now I’m thinking it’s probably a different issue/plugin that’s causing it.  I have a post in on the Redirection plugins support forum, but they are far less responsive.  🙂

let us know what they say… 

seems like you should only have one redirection (old front to new) right?  most everything else should be disabled…

have you just tried a simple .htaccess redirect for the one page?  you might find it much simpler…

I only have 2 redirections, the main page and one from an old popular post to a page.

I would try a simple .htaccess redirect if I knew how to do that.  That’s a bit over my head.  I will look into how to do that though.

Still no word from the redirection plugin forum.

Well all my attempts at adding a redirect to the .htaccess file failed.  Not sure what I am doing wrong, I tried many different tutorials and set-ups.

Well I don’t know how to do an .htaccess redirect either. But it makes sense and would allow you to remove a plugin. I will endeavour to find out!

can you give example of what url you want to redirect? and the url you want to redirect to?

The original site is http://mywebsite.com/WPsite

I am redirecting that to:

http://mywebsite.com/WPsite/welcome/

The reason why that address looks weird is because the wordpress site is installed into a subfolder of the main website (the subfolder being /WPsite).  But our needs ended up out growing the original design of the theme’s “home” page which is why we created a custom page called “welcome” to serve as the new home page.  So /WPsite is the index (but does not have any page associated with it) and /WPsite/welcome/ is simply a wordpress page.  

Here is what my current .htaccess looks like

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

# END WordPress

I tried several different methods, but the most common result was getting stuck in an infinite redirect loop, even after disabling and removing the plugin.

Steve (Mr Papa) will be around later on and he is the one who knows these things!