You didn’t even know I had one, did you?

Permalinks are (in part) simply web page links that make a little more sense when you read them than index.php?p=123 does. I’m running my site on a Mac running system 10.4 (Tiger) and Apache, PHP, and MySQL (a combination sometimes referred to as MAMP). Anyway, WordPress 2 wouldn’t operate when I turned Permalinks on. “Access to / is forbidden or not allowed.”

It turns out that I needed to get Options FollowSymLinks in the .htaccess file. WordPress doesn’t add it when turning on Permalinks, but it seems to be required. They must assume it’s a pretty standard default, but it is not default on a Mac, apparently. Indeed, you’ll need to update /etc/httpd/users/(your-user).conf to AllowOverride All (or more secure would be AllowOverride to just the specific things you need) to have Permalinks work, too.