Redirect from WP subfolder back to root

Hacking the .htaccess to redirect wordpress

[rschwab]

Hello!

I have a drupal installation in my domain root, with wordpress running under the /blog subdirectory. This was all fine and well until I tried using the drupal blog module, which tries to use that same /blog subdirectory, only to get the request lost in the wordpress scripts.

The specifics:

• I have my wordpress URL's set up to use the year as the first part of the path past blog, for example: http://www.example.com/blog/2010/this-is-a-blog-post
  
• Drupals blog module will use the same spot for the year, but populate it with userid data, example for user 1: http://www.example.com/blog/1
  
• My goal is to have all URLs with a number in that 3rd URL part route back to http://www.example.com/index.php so Drupal can bootstrap it
  
• The exceptions being the numbers 2010-2020 (those users are just out of luck) - I want those reserved for the next 10 years worth of wordpress blogging.
  

The solution is to hack up the .htaccess file in my wordpress directory.

Here is my ham-handed attempt at doing so:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /blog/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /blog/index.php [L]
# Here I try to route any URL with numbers after /blog/
RewriteRule ^\d+ http://www.example.com/index.php [L]
# Here I try to send 2010-2020 back to /blog/index.php
RewriteRule ^(201\d | 2020)/* http://www.example.com/blog/index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

I feel like I'm not doing this quite right, and want to be sure before I put this on a live server. Can anyone verify and help point me towards fixing any broken parts?

Thanks so much!
-Ryan

[jdMorgan]

PCRE patterns will only work on Apache 2.x.

You have syntax errors due to the spaces in your patterns. mod_rewrite code is not free-format, and literal spaces must be escaped. Unescaped spaces terminate the 'fields' of the directives, and may not be used for pretty-code formatting.

I don't know why you're using the RewriteBase directive, unless your server config is weird.

This code will need to go into your top-level .htaccess if you wish to 'steer' requests to either /index.php or /blog/index.php

Do not redirect to http://www.example.com/blog.index.php unless you have already corrected all of those URLs and no longer link the "2000" URLS to /blog/2000. I suggest an internal rewrite, which can only be done (in this case) if the code is located in example.com/.htaccess

You might consider keying off both the numeric range and the lack of further URL-path info past the numbers... Saying that userIDs between 2010 and 2020 are "out of luck" sounds a bit too cavalier for my taste.

Frankly, you'd do better to consider re-installing these blogs into separate and explicit subdirectories -- or even into separate subdomains.

Jim

[rschwab]

Thanks Jim! I've re-written the blog module to use a different path like you suggest.

The RewriteBase directive comes from the standard wordpress install - with the exception of the last two RewriteRule statements that is the out-of-the-package wordpress .htaccess file.

- Ryan

[jdMorgan]

Yeah, I've seen their code before, but usually without the RewriteBase. There are other problems with that code that usually cause poor performance if your site is busy and on a shared server.

See Reducing Costly Rewrites in Wordpress [webmasterworld.com] in our Apache Forum Library for a quick way to speed up your WP performance. You can likely use the same technique for other applications that use a similarly-poor rewrite.

Jim