Hi All,
I’m trying to change a URL for a series of pages from a query string based URL to a “pretty” URL. The current URLs look like this:
www.example.com/catalog/index.php?manufacturers_id=190
And I want to make them like this:
www.example.com/manufacturer
I have a rule that makes the new URLs active:
RewriteRule ^mfrone$ /catalog/index.php?manufacturers_id=190 [QSA,L]
RewriteRule ^mfrtwo$ /catalog/index.php?manufacturers_id=198 [QSA,L]
… etc …
Now I want all the existing links on the site and incoming links in the old format to redirect to the new format (without an infinite loop).
I’m trying this but it does not seem to have any effect at all:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/catalog/index\.php$
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} manufacturers_id=190
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/mfrone [R=301,L]
I’m hoping a fresh set of eyes (and brains) will make me see my folly!
Thanks!
s,
Been there, done that, answered that and included that in my signature’s tutorial. Please have a read THEN ask questions on implementation.
Suggestion: Use unique manufacturer names rather than the digits as you MUST use one or the other in the regex to make any sense out of redirections.
Regards,
DK
Thanks for the lead DK.
I’ve been reading your tutorial while I click refresh to see if someone responded to the thread 
So I’ve gleaned the following tidbits:
RewriteCond %{IS_SUBREQ} false
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/catalog/index\.php$
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} manufacturers_id=190
RewriteRule .? http://www.example.com/mfrone [R=301,L]
The “not capturing what you don’t need” tip is useful as is the IS_SUBREQ test string to prevent loops.
However, I’m still not getting any effect from these rules. It’s like they are not even there. I wasn’t even to the point of getting an infinite loop because the rewrite wasn’t happening (for some unknown reason). I think it should work, but it doesn’t and I don’t know why.
s,
You missed the one critical point at the beginning: YOU create the new format for the link and let mod_rewrite redirect to the servable URI.
What does mfone serve? My guess is NOTHING!
Drop back 10 but don’t punt - PLAN! If you want cat/IBM as the URI (cat would be necessary only if you want to have other links to redirect), it’s easy to create regex to catalog/index.php?manufacturers_name=IBM. If you prefer to use the IDs, then CREATE YOUR LINKS LIKE cat/90 but that’s hardly an improvement, is it? One point here is that the NEW URI needs to contain the information to use to convert it to the REAL URI.
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^cat/([a-zA-Z_]+)$ catalog/index.php?manufacturer_name=$1 [L]
Notice the direction of the redirection?
I seem to remember (Or am I losing it? Oh, better not answer that question!) that you also want to redirect TO the new format. That would add (before or after) the above RewriteRule:
RewriteCond %{IS_SUBREQ} ^false$
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} manufacturers_name=([a-zA-Z_]+)
RewriteRule ^catalog/index\\.php$ cat/%1 [R=301,L]
Yes, I do have a hang-up about using names or titles or … rather than digits to use to query the database. Just make sure that whatever you use is UNIQUE (which can be enforced by MySQL) in the database.
Another thing you (might have) missed is that Apache 1.x requires ^/ but Apache 2.x requires only ^. To allow either to match, you need to use ^/?. Because there are so few Apache 1’s left in the wild, I assumed Apache 2 in my code.
Please REread the tutorial as that should make the above code obvious.
Regards,
DK