redirect 301 x 800 or rewrite ?

[BigDutch]

Hello,

I am asking for some assistance on .htaccess and i understand this is the right place.

I have a 'spidered' site built in joomla cms where the articles have been indexed with URL structure of www.domain.com/content/view/{LISTINGID}/{menuid}/

The new site i've been working on with another cms will have the same article at its SEF URL of www.domain.com/menu-name/{LISTINGID}

Now i understand that I could make a 800+ line long entry similar to :

Redirect 301 OLD http://www.domain.com/new

but i have been looking around for examples of this over the last 1-2 hours at using rewrite but have not been able to get anything more than the redirect 301 to work.

Can someone point me towards a tutorial or provide some suggestions ?

thanks

[g1smd]

Use a single line RewriteRule with the RegEx pattern matching only URL requests that you need to be redirected.

Capture the parts of the request that you need to use again in a backreference. The target URL will also need to include the protocol and domain name. The rule will also use the [R=301,L] flags.



Actually, amended answer after reading the question again.

Since the target URL needs to contain "menu-name" and that information was not in the original URL request, you will need a completely different method to tackle this.

You will need to rewrite the requests to a PHP script that then "looks up" in the database what the new URL will be. The PHP script will then send the 301 redirect headers back to the browser.

If the list of IDs and names is fairly short (say, less than 100) and the list chnages infrequently you could load the data into a PHP array and do away with needing a database lookup from the PHP script.

[BigDutch]

the 'menu-name' is the same across all the listing URLs that i would like to be redirected - does that steer me back to a single rewriterule ?

[lucy24]

To clarify, because it can be read two ways:

Is "menu-name" your literal text, or do you mean {menuname} where the actual text is determined by the {menuid} value?

[g1smd]

If menu-name is always the same in the redirected-to URL, then you can probably use a single RewriteRule for all 800 redirects.

[BigDutch]

yes was a literal value - sorry for confusion. Ok, will look keep banging my head with the syntax of rewriterule.

[lucy24]

Bookmark this page if you haven't already done so ;)

[httpd.apache.org...]

The parts you especially need are rewrite_cond and rewrite_rule.

Note that Rules and Conditions work on a "two steps forward, one step back" principle. Apache doesn't even look at the rewrite_cond unless the rewrite_rule might apply. So for example:

Rewrite_cond %{HTTP_REFERER} {site-I-can't-stand}
Rewrite_rule foobar\.html {blahblah}

If the request being processed is not for a page called foobar.html, then mod_rewrite moves along without ever looking at the Condition. You could say

Rewrite_cond %{REQUEST_URI} foobar\.html
Rewrite_cond %{HTTP_REFERER} {site-I-can't-stand}
Rewrite_rule [a-z]+\.html {blahblah}

and it would "work", but it would waste a lot of server time* and resources because now it has to look up the Conditions every single time anyone requests a page.


* Those nanoseconds really add up.

[g1smd]

There's no underscore in RewriteCond or RewriteRule (and note the casing). :)

The basic redirect format is:

RewriteRule ^patterna/patternb/(patternc)/ http://www.example.com/newpath/$1 [R=301,L]

[lucy24]

Holy ###. Wonder what nether reaches of my brain those came from?* Let us stipulate that the cat stepped on the keyboard, and that what I thought I was typing was

Note that Rules and Conditions work on a "two steps forward, one step back" principle. Apache doesn't even look at the RewriteCond unless the RewriteRule might apply. So for example:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} {site-I-can't-stand}
RewriteRule foobar\.html {blahblah}

If the request being processed is not for a page called foobar.html, then mod_rewrite moves along without ever looking at the Condition. You could say

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} foobar\.html
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} {site-I-can't-stand}
RewriteRule [a-z]+\.html {blahblah}

and it would "work", but it would waste a lot of server time* and resources because now it has to look up the Conditions every single time anyone requests a page.

* Possibly from the name mod_rewrite, but that's grasping at straws ;)

[g1smd]

That's OK. I once filled a htaccess file with {%HTTP_HOST} and {%THE_REQUEST} (the "%" is in the wrong place) and wasted a whole hour wondering why I was getting Server Error 500 all the time.