Need guidance with SEO friendly URLS via mod_rewrite

Question

I've been having a hard time getting this to actually work. So I'm using a CMS that through its own administration tools utilizes "pretty urls" so the .htaccess file that is generated comes pre-supplied with a Rewrite Condition already. Now this works but its only for the CMS generated pages that are extensions of the index.php. So for example index.php?id=maps are nicely shown as www.siteurl.com/maps/ instead of www.siteurl.com/index.php?id=maps.

Now my problem is that I have about 1900+ product pages that are generated from query strings.

So for example I have page urls that look like:

https://www.siteurl.com/item.php?id=0012345&pg=author-title

ideally I want the urls to be:

https://www.siteurl.com/0012345/author-title.html

I've tried a number of mod_rewrite generators to give me the correct syntax, but nothing has worked so far.

Currently in my .htaccess file is the preexisting language:

RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule /?([A-Za-z0-9_-]+)/?$ index.php?id=$1 [QSA,L]

I changed it to something like this:

RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule /?([A-Za-z0-9_-]+)/?$ index.php?id=$1 [QSA]
RewriteRule ^([^/]*)/([^/]*)\.html$ /item.php?id=$1&pg=$2 [QSA,L]

But it doesn't work. I just get a 404 page. Please tell me where I'm wrong. Thanks.

cmc cmc · Accepted Answer · 2012-03-13T10:11:41

Try replacing /index.php with index.php.

What's kind of counter intuitive is that you need the leading slash in Apache server configuration, but must omit it in htaccess.

Need guidance with SEO friendly URLS via mod_rewrite

1 Answers