#63 – Follow up to #27 - htaccess regex rule problems

  This is a follow-up to the issue we were having with htaccess regex rules, redirecting the old URLs to the new ones created with sh404sef.

I've been round-and-round with our hosting company's support trying to get this working, and they told us 'use sh404sef and create manual redirects using the joomla redirect' (which is not practical when you have 3000+ different old urls to redirect). So I'm asking here one more time to see if maybe you can spot the problem or offer some sort of practical solution.

Here's what we have right now in our htaccess file:

RewriteRule ^topics\/([-0-9a-zA-Z]+)?\/([0-9]+)(-)([0-9a-z,-]+)? http://xxxx.net/topics/$1/$4 [L,R=301]

Things work fine except when we have an article that starts with an number like
"9 New Year's REsolutions for Cattle Producers" which generates a URL like this:

http://xxxx.net/topics/management/3542-9-new-years-resolutions-for-cattle-producers

When that happens the rule automatically removes the "9" from the article alias, resulting in:

http://xxxx.net/topics/management/new-years-resolutions-for-cattle-producers

I've tried placing a new htaccess rule in advance of the above rule:

Redirect 301 /topics/management/3542-9-new-years-resolutions-for-cattle-producers http://xxxx.net/topics/management/9-new-years-resolutions-for-cattle-producers

or

rewriterule /topics/management/3542-9-new-years-resolutions-for-cattle-producers http://xxxx.net/topics/management/9-new-years-resolutions-for-cattle-producers [r=301,nc,L]

But the 'generic' (regex) rule seems to always run and remove the leading number from the article name/alias.

I've also tried a regex like this:

RewriteRule ^topics\/([-0-9a-zA-Z]+)?\/([0-9]{1,4}?)(-)([0-9,a-z,-]+)? http://xxxx.net/topics/$1/$4 [L,R=301]

to try to isolate the initial article number from the number appearing at the start of the article name, but it doesn't solve the problem either.

I've had several people suggest multiple solutions, but haven't been able to get this to work.
I'm at my end of being able to resolve this.

This isn't rocket-science and should be a rather common need in the world of Joomla (esp. for those migrating from std Joomla SEF to sh404sef URLs).
I just need to redirect old ULRs with article numbers to new ones (with sh404sef) without the article numbers.

Are you able to look at this and see what might solve the problem?

I just wanted to follow-up on this and let you know what we found.

After having several rather advanced apache managers look at this (and LOTS of testing) we arrived at the fact that complex rules like these in apache are not reliable.

We even had 2 rules that were identical, except for the folder in the match path (so it was matching 'topics' vs 'news'). The rule for 'topics' worked, but the rule for 'news' didn't.

So we're in the process of manually creating unique rewrite rules for EVERY old URL to the new URL (we'll use some scripting to create those entries) and then place them in the htaccess.

After consulting with several SEO/server experts, they convinced me/us that the best place for these rules (to keep Google reporting properly, etc.) is in the htaccess.

I wish there was some extension that would do this (create a bunch of rewrite rules that take old URLs and then using a regex rule, output the new url), but, because this would likely only need to be a one-use tool, there probably isn't much market for it.

If you're interested (if it will help others) I'll document the process and share with you (although, this might be worth submitting to the Joomla magazine for all to see).


Thanks again for your help in this process.

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