I’ve finally gotten my Wordpress blog up and running on my subdomain along with custom permalinks. Since this task ended up being a lot harder than it should have been, I’ve decided to write about it as my first post, hopefully it will help any one else who has encountered the same problem.

I use economy hosting with godaddy , which is also my domain registrar.  I installed Wordpress using godaddy’s quick install setup. I then created a subdomain and pointed it to my Wordpress directory and then the fun began.

After a number of clean installs, various htaccess configurations, 404 errors, 500 errors, redirect loops, and hours of searching the web, I was finally able to hack together a fix allowing me to use my subdomain as my “blog address” but could not get custom permalinks to work, so I decided to remove my blog subdomain and subsequent A (Host) record. I then went back into the Wordpress admin settings and changed the blog address from the subdomain I had created back to the Wordpress directory I then tried the custom permalinks once more and to my suprise they worked flawlessly. So I decided to give the subdomain another shot.

I logged into my godaddy account, and proceded to the  Hosting Control Center. I then clicked on settings, followed by domain management, which brought up my single domain  which I’m hosting, I then clicked on my domain name, then clicked on the add subdomain button on the following screen. I then typed in blog as my subdomain and chose my wordpress directory as the folder. Waited about ten minutes or more to refresh the subdomain list to make sure the setup was complete.

After that I went back to my godaddy account home page and from there proceded to the Domain Manager and clicked on the appropriate domain name to check out the new settings, it was then I realized godaddy’s system had incorrectly set up my subdomain the first time around, so my suggestion to anyone setting up Wordpress and  a subdomain on godaddy is to do the following:

• First make sure Wordpress is functioning correctly using a regualr web directory i.e. yoursite.com/wordpress
• Next use the domain management settings found in the hosting control center to create your subdomain. After this is complete proceed to the Domain Manager.
• In the Domain Manager make sure the subdomains section is EMPTY there should be absolutely no subdomains in the subdomain section of the Domain Manager.
• Next click on the Total DNS Control and MX Records link and ensure that the A (Host) record for your blog points the the same IP address as the A (Host) record for @ .

Now your subdomain should be working properly and you can proceed to completing the setup of your wordpress blog with the next two steps.

• Login to your Wordpress admin and change the blog address from the Wordpress directory to the corresponding subdomain which you just setup i.e. blog.yoursite.com
• Next open the htaccess file in your wordpress directory and make sure the RewriteBase is / and the RewriteRule is . /index.php [L], you’ll proably need to remove wordpress/ from both lines (or what ever the name of the directory which you have wordpress installed in is).

I hope someone may find this information useful.

Related posts:

1. Add Images to Your WordPress Summary Feed
2. Redirect a WordPress Post to its Permalink
3. WordPress 2.7 Released

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 26th, 2008 at 10:13 pm and is filed under wordpress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.