How to: Get Falbum to work in Wordpress 2.0

I’m writing this post in hope of helping someone that are having issues with WordPress 2.0 and getting the latest version of Falbum (the off site flickr album viewer for wordpress) to work. The main issue is that if you want to get Falbum’s friendly url’s to work you’ll need to enabled them. Then edit the .htaccess file in the root of your blog directory and move the block of code that talks about Falbum above the wordpress block.

# BEGIN FAlbum
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^photos/?([^/]*)?/?([^/]*)?/?([^/]*)?/?([^/]*)?/?([^/]*)?/?([^/]*)?/?([^/]*)?/?([^/]*)?/?$ /wp-content/plugins/falbum/falbum-wp.php?$1=$2&$3=$4&$5=$6&$7=$8 [QSA,L]
# END FAlbum
# BEGIN WordPress
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php

# END WordPress

Why? well, they confilct somehow and since .htaccess files are read from top to bottom, it would set the falbum rule first, then it would set the wordpress rules which will fix the issue. After doing so you’ll notice that Falbum will work, but only in Firefox. For some reason IE will come back with a 500 error and complain. The way around this is you’ll need to make a change in the WordPress Admin >> Options >> Permalinks area. For it to work on my site I needed to change the “optional” area so it reads /category (see picture below). I’m not sure why this fixes it, but it will allow IE to be able to view the pages and navigate the images.

Hopefully this helps someone out there and if it does, please leave a comment.