Wordpress Pretty permalinks

If you would like to have "pretty" URL's in wordpress, you can configure this using the "Permalinks" setting in the admin site (wp-admin).  If you select the option "Month and name" this will result in pretty url's, such as category/news.
 
If when you do this, the pages do not load, then you may need to update your apache settings.  Below are the steps I followed.

Assumes you already have the mod_rewrite installed already.
 
  1. backup your .htacess file in the root directory of your wordpress site
  2. modify httpd.conf (this file should be in the conf dir under your apache install dir)
    uncomment:

    LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so
  3. modify httpd.conf
    Find the lines below and set AllowOverride to All
     #   Options FileInfo AuthConfig Limit
          AllowOverride All  
 
Now you can delete your .htaccess, go into the admin site, permalinks, select default, save, then select Month and name, then save.  A new .htaccess should be created and you should be in business. 
 

Your PHP installation appears to be missing the MySQL extension which is required by WordPress

I was recently setting up WordPress to run locally on my development machine and when I tried to browse to the WordPress homepage locally, I recieved the error:

Your PHP installation appears to be missing the MySQL extension which is required by WordPress.

My configuration:
Windowx XP
Apache 2.2
php-5.2.8
MySQL 5.1

To correct this issue, I did the following:

  1. In the Php.ini file (on my machine this is located at C:\Windows):
    Set extension_dir = "C:/Program Files/php-5.2.8/ext" (where php is installed on my machine)
  2. uncommented (remove ;)
    extension=php_mysql.dll
    extension=php_mysqli.dll
  3. Copied libmysql.dll from php dir to system32 (C:\WINDOWS\system32 on my machine)

Hope that helps anyone with a similar issue.