netnation.com: Friendly URL's not working... [Not Solvable]

Howdy folks,

I’m having a bit of a struggle getting Friendly URLs to work properly. I’ve set it up on 5 or 6 other sites in the past and haven’t had problems. But this current site is with a different hosting company and I wonder if the problem might lie with them...

Anyway, I enabled FURLs in Tools>Configuration section of MODx and followed all the directions on the MODx Wiki (http://wiki.modxcms.com/index.php/Friendly_URLs_Guide).

So, now the Wayfinder nav menu picks up the page aliases, but when I try to load a page, I get a 403 Access Forbidden error: http://motivationalresources.com/upcoming-events.html

I looked through the forums here but didn’t see this particular problem discussed. (If anyone could point me to a thread where it has already been covered, I’d be much obliged.)

So... does anyone have any suggestions for me?

Potentially Useful Details:
Apache server, hosting company has confirmed that mod_rewrite is allowed & enabled.
MODx ver. 0.9.6.1
I’m not running any snippets/plugins other than the Wayfinder.
Browser: Firefox 2/Safari 3 (OS X)

Is there other info I could provide that would be helpful?

Much thanks! (Truly... I mean that! If it weren’t for the very helpful MODx community here on the forum who’ve helped me out in the past, I probably would have given up on MODx long ago and would have missed out on this excellent CMS. Props to all of you who help out around here!)

EDIT: I should mention that the primary nav menu on the home page of this site is _not_ using the wayfinder. I did this until I’ve got the FURLs issue sorted out so that my client can access her inner pages (even if she always has to go back to the home page first.) The inner pages (like the sample link above) are using the wayfinder.

admin note: topic updated to reflect outcome

Hm i encountered something similar in the past. I replaced the .htaccess on the webhosting server with the one that comes with MODx without even looking at the file (because normally they are empty or not existant). After that i got "Forbidden" messages all the time.. even for static documents that worked before (and do not rely on rewriting).
I then found out, that the webhosting company did already place some important code in the .htaccess file which i should not have overwritten.

banal:

Thanks for the tip. I’ll check with the hosting company and see what they say.

Did you ever get it to work in the end?

banal:

I just tried uploading a static file and viewing it. Worked fine.

Yes, i managed to get it working in the end. I had to get the "correct" .htaccess from the hosting provider and then add my rewrite-rules inside the file.

Since your static page seems to be working, you can easily test if the rewriting works. Place a .htaccess with the following content on your server:


Replace <yourstaticfilename.html> with the correct file name. After that, if you enter http://yourdomain.com/test in your browser, you should see the contents of your static file. If not, rewriting seems not to work.

banal:

Sorry for the delay is responding... my computer was in the shop.

So, I tried your advice and had no luck. Does this mean that problem lies with the hosting provider?

--

Does anyone else out there have any suggestions/advice for this issue?

Hi leif.

Yeah, if that isn’t working it means your hosting provider does not allow mod_rewrite via .htaccess file. It doesn’t mean that url rewriting is not possible though. I have already seen a web-hoster that allowed definition of rewrite rules only in the hosting control-panel.
Since your provider told you that url rewriting is supported, i suggest you look in the tech docs of your hosting company how to do it. Or write them a e-mail.

Good luck

And when you get it figured out, please post back with the answer and your host name so others can benefit from your experience too. I’m moving this to the hosting experiences topic since that makes the most sense there.

rthrash, banal:

Thanks for you help here.  I’m glad to know the source of the problem & where to direct my energy. 

I’ll definitely check with my hosting company and report back.

Howdy,

Well, I wish I better news to report.  I made repeated inquiries to the hosting company (Net Nation - http://www.netnation.com/) about this problem.  I received replies to approximately half of my inquiries.  The other half were never answered.  For the replies that I did receive, when I wrote back with additional questions, my questions were never answered.  I even tried phoning them and my issue got "escalated" to the 2nd tier of support... but I never heard back from the 2nd-tier support people.

The frustratingly lousy support, combined with their high prices and their lousy custom back-end admin, (no Plesk, PHP MyAdmin or cpanel,) led me to recommend to my client that she switch hosting providers.  Thankfully she took my recommendation and we’re in the process of switching over to Web Serve (www.webserve.ca).  I’ve worked with them on quite a few projects and never had any problems.

So, thanks to those of you who helped me with this problem, and I’m anticipating things will go much better from here on out.

Cheers,

- Leif.