Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual weblog posts, as well as categories and other lists of weblog postings. A permalink is what another weblogger will use to link to your article (or section), or how you might send a link to your story in an e-mail message. The URL to each post should be permanent, and never change — hencepermalink.

Permalink Types

There are three basic types of WordPress permalinks:

Default: “Ugly”

The default looks like

http://example.com/?p=N

where N is the Post ID number. It works on all server environments, but it doesn’t look as nice as some of the other options.

mod_rewrite: “Pretty Permalinks”

Using mod_rewrite or lighttpd you can produce much nicer permalinks (see Pretty Permalinks). There are many different formats, but the most common, and most versatile looks like

    http://example.com/year/post-name/
or  http://example.com/year/month/day/post-name

Pretty permalinks are available under

• Apache web server with the mod_rewrite module
• Microsoft IIS 7+ web server with the URL Rewrite 1.1+ module and PHP 5 running as FastCGI
• Microsoft IIS 6+ using ASAPI_Rewrite
• Lighttpd using a 404 handler or mod_rewrite (see See Also)

PATHINFO: “Almost Pretty”

PATHINFO permalinks look very much like mod_rewrite permalinks but for one exception: they have /index.php inserted before them, like so:

http://example.com/index.php/yyyy/mm/dd/post-name/

Otherwise, they are the same as the “pretty” mod_rewrite permalinks, and are similarly flexible. Anything thatmod_rewrite permalinks can do, PATHINFO permalinks can do, with the help of that /index.php part.

There is a helpful plugin that displays the type of permalinks being used and detailed information on the internal rewrite rules used by WordPress.