While the Wordpress permalinks and friendly 404 page appeared to be working just fine on the public site after being added to the Lighttpd configuration, things were breaking in the Wordpress Admin section.

There is a way to bypass the default Wordpress functionality which displays the home page’s children when a user submits an empty search query, and instead display a “No search results found” in your normal search results theme template.

A quick look into how the WordPress posts tables are set up and a custom view query that can be used outside of php to loop through the posts or pages.