I just tried to change the permalink in wordpress so it looks nicer and the links are more like “http://ansi.23-5.eu/2011/12/29/apache-rewrite-for-wordpress/” instead of “http://ansi.23-5.eu/?id=blubber/”. Normally this is done in 2 steps. But I had some error in my virtual host configuration file. But please let me first explain the 2 normal steps. Just for the sake of completeness.

1. Inside WordPress under /Settings/Permalinks change it to some nice looking.
2. As root execute “a2enmod rewrite” and a nice “/etc/init.d/apache2 restart”

Normally thats all. But it turns out that I had a mistake in my virtual host config file.

It looked like

    <Directory /var/www/ansi.23-5.eu/>
        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
        AllowOverride none
        Order allow,deny
        allow from all
    </Directory>

But with this setting it disables the rewrite for this virtual server. The right config should

look like this:

    <Directory /var/www/ansi.23-5.eu/>
        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
        AllowOverride all
        Order allow,deny
        allow from all
    </Directory>

With this change and a "/etc/init.d/apache2 restart" everything works fine and I have the nice permalinks.