Forum Moderators: phranque
I need to go from this: www.domain.dom/blog-archive.php?page=20080531-road-trip
to this: www.www.domain.dom/2008/05/31/road-trip/
I've tried several methods (found in different Google searches) but they all result in a 404 page not found error. The destination page does show up fine if I enter the URL directly. And, to test that the redirect otherwise working, I tried a page (that doesn't exist) without any path arguments, and the redirection worked just fine:
Redirect 301 /test.php [domain.dom...]
This is what I've been (most recently) using to try to redirect the page with path arguments:
Redirect 301 /blog-archive.php?page=20080531-road-trip [domain.dom...]
I've tried escaping different characters to no avail.
Any ideas on how to get this to work?
However, this is the third of three steps, and you haven't mentioned the first two (and more-important) steps at all.
See this thread [webmasterworld.com] for details.
Jim
The old server used this structure for URLs:
www.domain.dom/blog-archive.php?page=20080531-road-trip
The new server uses this URL for the new page with the same content:
www.domain.dom/2008/05/31/road-trip/
I'm unclear what rewriting would do, as "www.domain.dom/blog-archive.php?page=20080531-road-trip" doesn't exist at all on the new server.
Using this method, it appears that only a single RewriteRule will be needed.
[added] If you are not changing domain names, then I recommend that you read and understand that cited thread carefully before rushing off to make a change. It is likely that the method in that thread is exactly what you need to do, and if you simply do a redirect (as described here in this thread), you'll have trouble.
You say "the new server uses URLs like this," but in fact, the server doesn't care what the URL is. If you use the wrong method, then the SEF plug-in code that you very likely have on that new server and your redirect will likely interfere with each other, causing an "infinite" rewrite/redirect loop. And in that case, the method in the cited thread is precisely what you need to fix the problem. The SEF plug-in would be "step 2" in the cited thread.[/added]
Jim
[edited by: jdMorgan at 10:00 pm (utc) on May 31, 2008]
For example, in the URL "blog-archive.php?page=20080531-road-trip" the path argument for the page variable is "20080531-road-trip" which I cannot break down. (I'm sure there's probably a way to break that down somehow, but still the final bit, the "road-trip" part may not necessarily associate with the text for the new URL structure.)
In this example, the new URL is "http://www.domain.dom/2008/05/31/road-trip/" but that's just in this case. In another URL, the path argument may have been something like "20080530-new-rental" and the new URL might be something like "http://www.domain.dom/2008/05/30/new-rental-car/" or even something where the text doesn't associate at all.
So, as I see it, I cannot do a rewrite rule that changes one pattern to another because there isn't necessarily a pattern that can be extracted from the old path arguments.
I think that I would need some way of hardcoding each URL to redirect to the new URL.
Here is what my .htaccess file looks like without any of the aforementioned attempts at redirection:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.domain.dom$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ [domain.dom...] [R=301]
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
You can use the "examine QUERY_STRING" method then.
Put individual rules for the old URLs that "don't associate" first, then follow with a generic (e.g. "new-rental-car" rules first, a generic to map "road-trip" and other directly-associatable URLs)
Where that thread may help you is in demonstrating regex pattern and back-reference usage for the directly-associatable URLs.
If you have a ton of individual rules, there's a trick you can use to make the code 50% more compact. That's details, though, and can wait until you get a few basic rules working.
Jim
RewriteCond %{query_string} ^page=20080531-car-ride$
RewriteRule ^blog-archive\.php$ [domain.dom...] [R=301,L]
Thanks!
Here's what the whole pile should look like, with various corrections/clean-ups:
# Specific redirect
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^page=20080531-car-ride$
RewriteRule ^blog-archive\.php$ http://www.example.com/2008/05/31/road-trip/? [R=301,L]
#
# Catch-all at the end for directly-associated URLs
# (e.g. blog-archive.php?page=20080531-road-trip -> /2008/05/31/road-trip/)
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^page=([0-9]{4})([0-9]{2})([0-9]{2})-(.+)$
RewriteRule ^blog-archive\.php$ http://www.example.com/%1/%2/%3/%4/? [R=301,L]
#
# Redirect any other non-canonical requests to canonical domain
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(www\.example\.com)?$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
#
# WP internal rewrite code
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
Jim
I have about a dozen of two different sets of pages. The first set is on the blog-archive.php page and the other is on a page.php page. With that second set, the path argument value begins with a letter, as in a20080531-title-text. So, for those, would I do something like this:
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^page=([a-z]{1})([0-9]{4})([0-9]{2})([0-9]{2})-(.+)$
RewriteRule ^page\.php$ http://www.example.com/%2/%3/%4/%5/? [R=301,L]
Am I right that I would need to do:
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^page=([0-9]{4})([0-9]{2})([0-9]{2})-(.+)$
RewriteRule ^page\.php$ http://www.example.com/%1/%2/%3/%4/? [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^page=([a-z]{1})([0-9]{4})([0-9]{2})([0-9]{2})-(.+)$
RewriteRule ^page\.php$ http://www.example.com/%2/%3/%4/%5/? [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^page=([0-9]{4})([0-9]{2})([0-9]{2})-(.+)$
RewriteRule ^blog-archive\.php$ http://www.example.com/%1/%2/%3/%4/? [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^page=([a-z]{1})([0-9]{4})([0-9]{2})([0-9]{2})-(.+)$
RewriteRule ^blog-archive\.php$ http://www.example.com/%2/%3/%4/%5/? [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^page=[b]([a-z])?[/b]([0-9]{4})([0-9]{2})([0-9]{2})-(.+)$
RewriteRule ^page\.php$ http://www.example.com/%2/%3/%4/%5/? [R=301,L]
Also, if "blog_archive.php" and "page.php" are now to be redirected to the same static URL-set, then you can combine all four rules above into one:
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^page=([a-z])?([0-9]{4})([0-9]{2})([0-9]{2})-(.+)$
RewriteRule ^(blog_archiveŠpage)\.php$ http://www.example.com/%2/%3/%4/%5/? [R=301,L]
Jim
