MKRD.info - Thorough articles on a variety of topics, and no ads!

htaccess 301 rewrite and pretty URLs

I have found a big problem with htaccess and a CMS that I use.

When I enable "pretty URLs", 301 rewriting cannot be used properly.

See my forum posts at

http://forum.cmsmadesimple.org/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=55614&p=257950

http://forum.cmsmadesimple.org/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=55918

After each htaccess change, do not forget to do the following: clear CMS cache, clear browser cache, press ctrl+F5, and after page reloads, try your address query again.

What works:

See two links above for examples of redirects that work.

For example, a relative path to non—pretty query:

redirect 301 /about-this-website.html http://mkrd.info/?page=about-me

What does not work with "redirect 301" method:

redirect 301 /about-this-website.html http://mkrd.info/about-me.html

How to get 301 redirect to work:

------------------

With about half an hour of tweaking on my second attempt, I got it to work.

To summarize:

Old 301 rewrite rule was something like
redirect 301 /portals/electronics-as-a-hobby/general-and-misc-2.html http://wiki.mkrd.info/Electronics_as_a_Hobby_portal

To convert to a RewriteRule, use a ^ character. I think that this does pattern matching. Do not use opening "/". Add $ at the end of old page URL.

Any one character off will break the rewrite functionality.

RewriteRule ^portals/electronics-as-a-hobby/general-and-misc-2.html$ http://wiki.mkrd.info/Electronics_as_a_Hobby_portal [R=301,L]

Is the code to redirect a .html page that used to be within subfolders (as far as could be seen from outside CMSMS) (or parent pages in CMSMS) /portals and /electronics-as....

-----------------

Also, watch out for tiny errors in htaccess formatting, that will bring down your website (search this website for examples of such errors). For example:

SPACE HERE BREAKS SITE

#redirect 301 /Alien Shooter Games Series http://wiki.mkrd.info/Alien_Shooter_Game_Series_Portal

FILETYPE HERE BREAKS SITE

#redirect gone /uploads/publications/Michael's Memory Download - Linux.odt

˅˅˅ Additional valuable information is available at one of the links below: ˅˅˅