Question

I have to completely replace an existing website. The current site is completely spagetti code with some rewrite rules to mimic friendly urls.

There are some mission critical issues that can’t be resolved with the current architecture and database structure, so for a time both code bases need to live side by side.

This is the current .htaccess

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On 

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}\.html -f
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/$ $1.html
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/$ $1.php

RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ $1.php?q=$2
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ $1.php?q=$2&r=$3
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ $1.php?q=$2&r=$3&s=$4

I’m replacing it with a zend framework site, but it routes everything through the index.php file for the routing

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [L]
RewriteRule .* index.php

Does anyone have any idea how I can combine the two until the original can be completely replaced?

Answer 1

If you can map your old URLs to Zend Url someway, then it would be rather easy. Let’s say you had

http://foo.bar.com/something.php?q=arg1&r=arg2

then if you have this functionality working in Zend code, then you must also have valid URL there, like

http://foo.bar.com/something/q/arg1/r/arg2

If so, all you need is to rewrite that old URLs to Zend URL and instead of doing internal redirection, do HTTP redirection, i.e. (out of my head, not tested):

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^q=(.*)&r=(.*)^  
RewriteRule ^something\.php$ /something/q/%1/r/%2? [R=301,L]

Mind the trailing “?” which tells mod_rewrite NOT to attach original query string to rewritten one (otherwise you would end with /something/q/%1/r/%2?q=X&r=y. Note we do regular 301 HTTP redirection here.