Let’s start with the obvious just to make sure! How are you entering the post name permalink in the WP permalink panel?
And – secondly – do any other of the ‘defaults’ work – like ‘numeric’ for example?

Truth be told… I am not.

I am using WP 3.3.1. Since this version has a radio button option for Postname, I simply selected that one as it works on my other WP sites.

I have not tested any of the others, just default and post name

post name is what we use here…  and these days, more and more use too…

hard to tell anything with it in ugly default permalinks now – of course, I understand why…

any seo plugins for wp or redirection plugins?

nope… I have only 2 plugins installed: Simple:Press V5 and Configure SMTP (but this was only installed yesterday after I posted here).

Would you like me to create a login for you so that you can poke around??

Would probably be best if that is OK.

Can you make that an SP admin account? PM the credentials to both myself and to Mr Papa. Please include in the PM a link to the site, a lonk to this thread and just a brief reminder of the problem to save us time hunting around. Thanks

OK let’s talk about the .htaccess file.

When you change or first set up WordPress permalinks to anything but the default it will attempt to write out entries to the .htaccess file. If for any reason this can not be done then it will usually display a message with the text that it tried to write informing you that you need to do this manually. For reasons I could not begin to understand it seems that neither have happened on your site. So… try this.

Add this to your .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

Then go to the permalinks setting page and choose ‘custom’ and out in there:

/%postname%/

and give it another try. See if that helps.

Your site IS very sluggish. Perhaps not a great hosting company…

Should have added – make sure you use  a plain text editor!

great. I will give this a try over the weekend and report back.

Thanks for the help so far, have a great weekend.

Thanks – and you.
Yes – please do report back.

I am afraid this did not work. Please see the attached screenshots.

and that is the site listed in post 1?  quite a bit different looking…

not likely related, but you will have other issues because your site is throwing js errors… and its from the theme improperly loading js:

<script type=’text/javascript’ src=’http://www.biugsa.co.za/wp-content/themes/Arpora2_1_0/assets/js/jquery.1.6.2.js?ver=3.3.1′></script>
<script type=’text/javascript’ src=’http://www.biugsa.co.za/wp-content/themes/Arpora2_1_0/assets/js/jquery.ui.1.8.16.js?ver=3.3.1′></script>

see: http://codex.simple-press.com/codex/faq/troubleshooting/what-is-this-jquery-conflict/

The links work for me but assume its cause you put default back on…  our of curiosity, if you switch to the default wp theme and then put custom permalinks back on, is there any difference?

The site in the pictures the the hosts default error page, hence the difference.

I have tried swtiching to the default theme – this does not fix the issue… 🙁

Will look into the JS errors in the mean time… thx for all the help!!

When I visited your site the other day I believe there was only 1 page which was the forum.

If you create other pages do they lead to a 404 s well? Or does the ‘postname’ permalink work with them?

Wouldbe useful to know if this is an SP issue or is, actually, a WP wide issue.

I will test the theory for you, but I do have other WP sites hosted by the same hosting company and I use custom permalinks with no issue.

I will only get to test this tomorrow though, but will reply here as soon as I do.

as you can see from the screeny below, the custom permalink did not work, but, if you look at the second screeny, the permalink setting of “Post Name” did indeed work. Although I have tried Post Name as the permalink setting for Simple Press and this did not work.