Question

Scenario

I’m moderating a website that has moved to a WordPress based setup, but without access to all the administration tools in WordPress (it’s externally hosted/managed), but I do have access to the htaccess file. Now, there’s two things I need to do:

1. Redirect the old pages to the new url structure.
2. Redirect all www calls to non-www.

The challenge

I would however like to accomplish this with:

1. Fewest possible redirects per call (preferably only 1).
2. With limited rule duplication.
3. Be somewhat readable (not just one inline Regex handling it all).
4. All edited in the htaccess alone.

What is giving me a hard time, is keeping the redirects to a minimum when it is both an old url, and prefixed with www as well.

My next biggest problem is, that I would like to use a rewrite map, but it seems you have to load something externally, rather than defining a dictionary in the htaccess file which is what I would prefer.

Further details

• I’m no expert at using the Rewrite Engine so I might be missing a simple solution here.
• The old website was structured simply with /index.php?page=<pageName>.
• The new website uses seo-friendly urls /a-new-url-example/.
• Two examples could be:
  1. from mydomain.com/index.php?page=boots to mydomain.com/boots/
  2. from www.mydomain.com/index.php?page=shoes to mydomain.com/shiny-shoes/ (some kind of map is needed to handle shoes->shiny-shoes)
• The current setup on my own computer does not allow me to test it locally (having a lot of conflicts with other projects), so currently I am testing the setup with http://htaccess.madewithlove.be/.
• Current content of the htaccess file (on pastebin, as the code kept getting interpreted as something else here).

Answer 1

I hope this doesn’t clash with your existing rules inside htaccess, as you have provided that.

#exceptions first
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^page=shoes3$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ /shiny-shoes/? [R=302]

#urls that directly map to the new url scheme
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^page=(.*)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ /%1/? [R=302]

#note the absence of the L flag in the above rules.
# from apache docs: the [R] flag prepends http://thishost[:thisport] to the URI, but then passes this on to the next rule in the ruleset

# no-www (make sure this is the last rule)
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(.*)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^http://[^/]+/(.*)$ http://%1/$1 [R=302,L]