Finally Fixed rss Feed in WP 1.3alpha
It took me a little while to track it down, but for some reason the RSS feeds in WordPress 1.3 alphas weren’t working for me. Turns out it was a problem with the .htaccess file I was using.
The are rules at the end of the .htaccess file that are meant to redirect visitors to the appropriate category or category feeds. Unfortunately, there is a problem in the way the rule is written that I don’t fully understand.
I filed a bug in WordPress on the category redirect not working right. I didn’t realize there was also a similar problem with the feed redirects.
It turns out the line
RewriteRule ^([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{1,2})/([^/]+)/(feed|rdf|rss|rss2|atom)/?$ /index.php?year=$1&monthnum=$2&name=$3&feed=$4 [QSA]
caused the trouble. When I converted it to its semantic equivalent (I believe), it works
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9_-]{1,})/(feed|rdf|rss|rss2|atom)/?$ /index.php?category_name=$1&feed=$2 [QSA]
All that to say, the rss feeds for this site (and some of the others I manage) are finally working again.
Whew.
Now to figure out a way to get WordPress properly documented…