htaccess ReWrite Problems

[MattHawkins]

Hi everyone,

I've got an .htacess that is doing some basic URL rewriting.

It looks something like this :

# ReWrite required to format URLs for search engines
RewriteEngine On

RewriteRule ^archive.html+ index.php?module=archive

It works fine. The user puts in archive.html but actually gets the results of index.php?module=archive. No problems.

As I've recently ditched Postnuke in preference for my own efforts I need to direct some of the old Postnuke style URLs to their equivalent pages in my new system.

So I added :

redirect /index.php?module=pagesetter&tid=4 http://www.matthawkins.co.uk/index.php?itemid=56

ie I want the Pagesetter article with id=4 to actually go to my index.php page with itemid set to 56.

This doesn't work. It just gives me my homepage ... which implies that my index.php file is being run with unwanted parameter module=pagesetter and tid=4. ie no rewriting is happening at all.

redirect /index.php http://www.matthawkins.co.uk/index.php?itemid=56

Doesn't work either. But ...

redirect /indexxxxxx.php http://www.matthawkins.co.uk/index.php?itemid=56

does.

This all implies that rewrite doesn't like redirecting URLs where the file actually exists.

How to I redirect the old Postnuke URLs which include index.php when I've already got my own index.php?

None of the help I've found on the internet mentions this. In fact most of the help implies my existing rewrites shouldn't work because I haven't escaped the . in my filenames with a \ !!

Any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated.

Matt

[tkgafs]

redirect uses mod_alias is it turned on ?

see http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/mod/mod_alias.html

I am also pretty sure it will ignore the the params that are supplied hence it will simply pass the input argument to the output which is presumably what you are seeing as both sides are index.php

I think you need to use rewrite rather redirect but I dont have access to my systems at the moment to create a test rule

tkgafs

[tkgafs]

Try something like the following

rewriteCond %{query_string} module=pagesetter&tid=4
rewriteRule ^index\.php$ /index.php?itemid=56? [R,L]



all the best

Tkgafs

[MattHawkins]

Thanks Tkgafs!

rewriteCond %{query_string} module=pagesetter&tid=4
rewriteRule ^index\.php$ /index.php?itemid=56 [R,L]

Worked fine. It didn't need the question mark after the '56'.

I can rebuild my list of rewrite rules and cross that job off my list.

Thanks for you time

Matt

[ff1]

Although this rewrite rule provides the desired results, I would actually suggest using a different approach:

It should be fairly trivial to write a PHP snippet that reads the values for module and tid, looks in your database for the relevant itemid value and then redirects using a 301 to the new url.

The reason that I suggest this is that it actually informs search engines that the page has been permenantly moved (301) to the new URL. It also presents the new url in a users browser address bar. Using the rewrite rule will show the old url in the browser address bar. The other advantage to this approach is that after a period of time (say 12-24 months), you could remove this code with little or no problems (as long as all links have been updated). Your rewrite rule solution will need to be a permenant fixture of your website hosting to continue to satisfy the search engines.

If you really are happy with the previous proposed solution, then stick with it. But, IMHO, that would not be the best long term approach.

Hope that provides some food for thought.