My girlfriend has a hosting account at one.com for her domain (number of .se-domains owned by the two people in this household: Three). Until now, she has been running static html pages generated by Dreamweaver, but a month or so ago, she decided she wanted to go for Wordpress.

As she has a background as a PC technician and a good understanding of how computers work in general, and also because Wordpress is really easy to install, she managed to install and get working with Wordpress without much help. It did not work 100%, though. The file upload dialog was not working, instead displaying an error message from Apache, and after many common administrative operatings, the same apache error message was displayed, and you had to manually navigate to a known URL to get back into the interface.

\ After some analysis using Wireshark, I came to the conclusion that for some reason, the Apache servers at one.com didn’t let PHP scripts set the Location header when trying to do redirects with HTTP response code 302 (temporary relocation). Weird. \ \ The solution was to enable support for my-hacks.php (can be done via the administrative interface), and add a my-hacks.php to the root directory of the wordpress installation with the following contents:\ \

<?php$is_IIS = 1;?>

\ This causes wordpress to use an alternative strategy for doing redirects, which works better with the Apache servers at one.com.\ \ The fact that one.com has turned off the regular expression support in mod_rewrite did by the way not help when writing rules to make sure old links redirect to the new url scheme used by wordpress. \