Data engine failing, can PHP parse?

A variation on the 301 redirect

[Musicarl]

Hello.

We have a MySQL database on our server and for years have used a data engine called Lasso, so all files end in .lasso. As our traffic increased, Lasso became a major problem, and we are having the site re-written in PHP.

Our links that used to look like this:
www.example.com/detail.lasso?id=500
now look like this:
www.example.com/detail.php?id=500

Our problem is that we can't keep Lasso running on our server - it keeps giving connection failures and making me angry. This means our redirects don't work.

The simple solution seems to be: Have PHP parse any file with a .lasso extension. My concern is the search engines, and how they will react. Is this a good solution, or will we get smacked in the SERPs?

[dcrombie]

Can't you just:

RewriteRule (.*)\.lassoo $1.php [R=301,L]

or similar?

[jd01]

I think you are better off to server the php information to the .lasso files. If you change your extentions, the SEs (G anyway) will see every page on your site as new...

I recommend something close to what dcrombie said, but without the redirect:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^([^.]+)\.lasso$ /$1.php [L]

The biggest differences are:
The regular expression is a forward-looking, negative expression, which is more efficient than a 'catch-all' and the user will get the information from the php file at the lasso extention, not be redirected.

Hope this helps.

Justin

[Musicarl]

"If you change your extentions, the SEs (G anyway) will see every page on your site as new... "

That's what I'm worried about. Thanks for the options. This stuff seems simple, but I definitely don't want to get it wrong.