.htaccess and flash problems

[Davedough]

Great site. I stumbled upon here trying to find a solution to my problem and reading through your site pretty extensively, I believe I've found the gurus. </blatantbuttkissing>

I found one post about problems with flash and .htaccess but it didn't really fit my problem, so I wanted to ask. If this has been covered, I apologize, but I tried searching and came up with nothing substantial. Here goes.

I run a gaming website that has a CMS program where the front page has embedded flash to circulate 4 of the most recent featured articles. Recently, one of my editors said he could be trusted to help me on the server side with a few random problems I was having. Famous last words right?

Long story short, he took it upon himself to try and stop hotlinking, applied a few ReWrite rules and blew up the front page. Then, in a panic, he just simply deleted the .htaccess file as a whole which contained a LOT of code in there. Now, I've restored most of the code that I could, but for some reason the flash that is embedded is the only thing that isn't working right. I've looked over the code tirelessly for hours and cant see anything that stands out.

Currently the code is NOT preventing hotlinking, so I cant figure out why the flash is being blocked. Any pointers on where to begin looking? I'm running the latest PHP on an apache server if that matters.

[jdMorgan]

First you have to identify the specific functional problem in terms that are specific enough to communicate the problem. Review your server access and error logs (both!) to see what's going on on the server side, and use the Live HTTP Headers add-on for Firefox and Mozilla browsers to see what's happening at the HTTP transaction level.

Other suggestions:
1) Send the editor off to "always make a backup" school for at least three weeks.
2) If this is too much of a challenge, call in a local expert, and take it out of your editor's paycheck.

:)

Jim

[Davedough]

Ok, looking at my error log, it says... "File does not exist: /home/#*$!/public_html/sizzle.xml".

I searched and there is nothing in any directory called that. BUT, there's a sizzle.php which contains the reference to the flash rotating featured articles. Now, is there something in the .htaccess that will make the .php appear as .xml?

[g1smd]

Maybe you need a rewrite.. that translates the requested URL into a local filesystem filepath, one that is different to the filepath that is suggested by the URL.

[jdMorgan]

> Now, is there something in the .htaccess that will make the .php appear as .xml?

Possibly, but aside from having MultiViews (content negotiation, see Apache mod_negotiation) enabled, it would take an Alias or RewriteRule directive to cause that. So, scan your .htaccess file to see.

Also, carefully examine the filepath given in the error log. Other than the name of the file, is it absolutely correct (is it the filepath to which the requested URL *should* be resolved?)

Jim