URL Rewriting is the magic which is used to make nice looking URLs happen – ones which look like http://www.neato.co.nz/tag/food rather than http://www.neato.co.nz/index.php?tag=food

Unfortunately,  URL rewriting can be a tricksy thing to get working properly.  Hopefully this will help you figure out what’s happening, and get it to behave correctly!

First things first:  Go to the Options > Tags page,  and make sure the checkbox for “Use url rewriting for local tag urls” has been checked.  The base url should be /tags/ (with a slash on either side.  Putting a different word in place of tags is fine;  but the slashes need to be there).

Next,  go to the Options > Permalinks page,  and click the Update Permalink Structure button.  This will tell wordpress to do things with URLs that look like /tags/.

Check to see if that sorted it out (:

While you’re on the permalinks page,  consider your permalink structure.  If you are using the default structure, the rules may not be updated.  If you are using a permalink structure that starts with /%postname%/ or /%category%, there are things which are beyond my control that will prevent URL rewriting in UTW from working properly.

If you’ve changed anything, remember to click the Update Permalink Structure button before checking to see if it worked (: