Question

My mobile site (tiny custom CMS inspired by wordpress) has a homepage, blog page, a news page, an about page and a contact page where ./blog ./news ./about and ./contact are actual folders. Homepage, Blog and News are paginated. About and Contact are single pages, no pagination.

I need htaccess rewrite rules to do the following (A) and (B). I have only made progress with (A), and the htaccess file is in the site root.

(A)

• m.website.com/index.php?page=1 re-writes to m.website.com
• m.website.com/index.php?page=2 re-writes to m.website.com/page/2 etc
• m.website.com/blog/index.php?page=1 rewrites to m.website.com/blog
• m.website.com/blog/index.php?page=2 re-writes to m.website.com/blog/page/2 etc
• m.website.com/news/index.php?page=1 rewrites to m.website.com/news
• m.website.com/news/index.php?page=2 re-writes to m.website.com/news/page/2 etc

Problems:
Below is what I’m using for the above, but I only got it working for the homepage for now. I don’t know how to combine the rules to include blog and news pages too. Also, it duplicates my links because m.website.com and m.website.com/page/1 are both in use. I need to get rid of /page/1 everywhere. Pagination should start only from page 2. I tried to get rid of it using the RedirectMatch but it didn’t work so I commented it out.

RewriteEngine On  
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^page/(.*) index.php?page=$1 [NC]
#RedirectMatch 301 ^/page/1/$ http://m.website.com/

(B)

• I already have a permalink.php file which accepts pretty URLs and returns their postIDs
• The read-more link for each article on the home, blog or news page will have the format http://m.website.com/2012/03/the-post-title
• When clicked, the htaccess will query permalink.php with the string /2012/03/the-post-title to get the postID, then opens http://m.website.com/article.php?id=postID but the address in the address bar will be http://m.website.com/2012/03/the-post-title and this shows the article in full, be it home page, blog page or news page.

Problem: I have been searching and I’m not exactly sure how to go about (B) above but I know it’s possible. In the end, all rules for A and B will be in the same htaccess file in the site root.

Thanks

Answer 1

This should do the trick for you. It looks like you have done most of it so there isn’t muc to do.

RewriteEngine On  
RewriteBase /

# you do not need a rewrite for the root as you should have index.php
# as your default document and page 1 as your default page

RewriteRule ^page/1/?$                    / [NC,L,R=301]
RewriteRule ^page/(\d+)/?$                index.php?page=$1 [NC,L]

# you do not need a rewrite for blog as you should have index.php as your
# default document and page 1 as your default page

# you do not need a rewrite for news as you should have index.php as your
# default document and page 1 as your default page

RewriteRule ^(blog|news)/page/1/?$        $1 [NC,L,R=301]
RewriteRule ^(blog|news)/page/(\d+)/?$    $1/index.php?page=$2 [NC,L]

######################################################################
################## ADD YOUR PERMALINK.PHP CODE HERE ##################
######################################################################

UPDATE
To effectively turn /2012/03/the-post-title into a postID you need to be able to ask your database to do that for you as it is the only thing that knows the answer. So you can either use a RewriteMap http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.3/rewrite/rewritemap.html#dbd I have never done this myself and I would advise against it. Not because I know there is a problem with it I just have a bad feeling about it.

The alternative and one I would champion is to just do something like this:-

RewriteRule ^(\d{4})/(\d{2})/([^/]+))/?$     article.php?postIdentifier=$1/$2/$3 [L]

Then in article.php hit the database and use the information in the postIdentifier to get the correct article.

Make sense?