Thread

I have an old EE 1.6 site that has been migrated over to Wordpress (Sorry!) and I need to 301 redirect all the old articles to the new WP ones.

My htaccess is working file on simple html redirects but when i try to redirect an EE url nothing happens. On a simple redirect like this…

redirect 301 /index.php?/old_category/old_page_link /new/new-page-link

nothing works. I’ve tried every style of redirect syntax I know and nothing seems to do anything.

Is there anything in the way EE deals with url requests that would mean the htaccess redirect is getting missed or ignored? I thought htaccess rules ran first but maybe theres something in EE I’m missing or a trick to doing it.

Any hep would be massively appreciated as I’ve spent hours with my hosting company tracking the issues down to this level.

Thanks
Paul

Hi Paul,

.htaccess “runs” before ExpressionEngine comes into the picture. The directives are executed by the web server before any pages are served. This is one way that .htaccess can rewrite the URL before it served to browser.

Hove you tried:

redirect 301 /index.php?/old_category/old_page_link <a href="http://domain.tld/new/new-page-link">http://domain.tld/new/new-page-link</a>

Cheers!

Redirect in .htaccess ignores query strings, so anything after the ? is being ignored so it will never redirect as you think it will.  You will need to do actual mod_rewrite instead of simple Redirects a good starter article can be found here: http://www.simonecarletti.com/blog/2009/01/apache-query-string-redirects/

Yes, you’re correct, it does treat the ? as a query string so normal redirects won’t work. It took me a while to figure that one out but I did find a way to get it to work with htaccess code.

The URL has to be split up and works out the old url based on everything that comes after the ?

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^/rest/ofURL/afterquestionmark/$ 
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ <a href="http://example.com/new/URL">http://example.com/new/URL</a>? [L,R=301]

Please not the ? on the end of the last line, this stops the query string from the first line getting appended to the new URL.

Hope this helps anyone else with the same problem.

Hi pledbrook,

I’m glad you were able to come to a solution! Thanks for sharing for the benefit of the community.

Nevin, thank you for lending your expertise as well!

pled brook, if you need assistance in the future, just let us know in a new thread.

Cheers!