Credits: Video Training produced by Brian Teeman
Transcript of this course
WordPress ships with a special file which allows you to customise your urls.
If you've already set this up before you will have done this from the Settings->Permalinks and then set the url structure to one of the options below.
If all this worked fine then you can happily proceed with the htaccess maker part of AdminTools.
You will find the htaccess maker in the security section.
Remember if you've already been able to create without any modification the htaccess file then you can happily proceed with this section.
However, you should know that any changes made here have the possibility of completely blocking your entire web site so before you proceed you should make sure that you have FTP or some other hosting control panel file manager access to get your site back online. Just in case something goes wrong.
If, when you used WordPress own htaccess file you had to make some edits for it to work on your web host you will find those right down at the bottom of this file.
The most likely ones that you changed were to set the follow symlinks to yes and the base directory of your site from slash to some subdirectory.
If you were able to make WordPress own htaccess file work without any changes you can simply leave these as the default.
If we scroll back to the top we can see this htaccess maker includes various options to enhance the basic security of your web site.
Each one of these is documented in the AdminTools documentation section of the akeebabackup.com web site.
Remember, defaults are there for a very good reason and if you don't know what something is then you should leave it alone.
In addition to some web ste security there is also somme addtional server protection that is provided.
Some plugins may work in a non-standard way and you will have to provide exceptions to allow direct access to their files.
In addition we have the opportunity to create some cusyom htaccess rules.
If you don't know what these are don't worry about it, it doesn't apply to you.
But if you've had to create some already then this is where you will add them.
If you had previously added some code to change your php version for example, you should copy that code here.
Otherwise your host may default to a very old version of php.
The final section Optimisation and Utility adds some addtional tweaks to your web site and you shouldn't need to change these.
When yoou are happy with the settings click on the Save and Create htaccess button.
Your new htaccess file has been written to the disk and a backup of the old one has been taken.
At this point you must check to make sure that every part of your web site is working as it did before.
It should, but as menitoned before it may be necessary to add some edxceptions for some of your plugins.
If for some reason your web site is now completely blank for you and you haave a 500 error you should use your ftp program or your web hosts file manager to locate the .htaccess file in the root of your web space.
Rename this file.
Perhaps to .htaccess.new to prevent it from working and your web site will reload.
You should then return to AdminTools and the htaccess maker and review the settings until your web site is working perfectly.