.HTACCESS Tricks - Rewriting for dynamic content - apache

Question

I need to be able to make it so that when someone visits my site at say:
a) http://www.mysite.com/article/this-article/
It actually displays the content from:
b) http://www.mysite.com/article/index.php?src=this-article
and also if a user types in (b) then they are 301'd to (a)
In my HT access I currently have the following:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
# index.php to /
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET\ /.*/index\.(php|html)\ HTTP
RewriteRule (.*)index\.(php|html)$ /$1 [R=301,L]
# force www.
rewritecond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1 [r=301,nc]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET\ /.*\;.*\ HTTP/
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !^$
RewriteRule .* http://www.mysite.com%{REQUEST_URI}? [R=301,L]
</IfModule>

Answer 1

I'm not sure what you're describing is possible using only rewrite rules. But you can use a combination of rewrite rules and PHP like so:
Change your .htaccess file to look like this (NOTE: This is assuming your .htaccess file is in your root)
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
# force www.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.mysite\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1 [R=301,NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/article/index(-new)?\.php
# this is looking for anything past article that is not a /. You may
# need to change that to be more inclusive - something like (.*)
RewriteRule ^article/([^\/]+) /article/index-new.php?src=$1 [L,NC]
# index.php to /
RewriteRule ^index\.(php|html)$ / [R=301,L]
#RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET\ /.*/index\.(php|html)\ HTTP
#RewriteRule (.*)index\.(php|html)$ /$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET\ /.*\;.*\ HTTP/
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !^$
RewriteRule .* http://www.mysite.com%{REQUEST_URI}? [R=301,L]
</IfModule>
Your article/index.php will become a redirector to your new index.php, and would look something like this:
<?php
if (isset($_GET["src"]))
header("location: /article/" . basename($_GET["src"])); // Using basename() in case src happens to be referring to an actual file in your code
else
header("location: /");
?>
Your "real" index would actually be index-new.php, which is what the rewrite rule would be calling.