In trying to post about my modified Twitter stats script, I ran into a 403 Forbidden error every time I tried to publish. I could write and publish test posts with minimal text, but I could not post what I had written about my scripts.

At first I thought it was an outdated version of Wordpress that was responsible for the error. However, upgrading to 2.3 did not fix anything. I simply ignored the error and conceded that I would not be able to post anything for now.

Wordpress 2.5 was released today, and I decided to try posting once more. I still got the same error. This time, I decided to Google the issue.

The results are not suprising.

It seems that Wordpress has some parsing issues when posts contain certain PHP commands. Apparently, modifying the mod_security rules in .htaccess helps to resolve this issue.

Adding the following code to the .htaccess file in wp-admin/ does the trick.

<IfModule mod_security.c>
    SecFilterEngine Off
</IfModule>