External PHP file & Pretty Permalink
I can’t say I’ve ever tried including wp-load.php directly, but I’ve had success using: define(“WP_USE_THEMES”, false); include(“wp-blog-header.php”); … when trying to invoke WordPress stack in a non-templated workflow. wp_blog_header.php does make the call out to wp-load.php but also wires up some other stuff (such as calling wp()).