URL rewriting via Wordpress Rewrite or .htaccess

Question

JUMP TO EDIT8 TO SEE HOW I SOLVED THIS

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Let\'s say I have a Wordpress blog: www.animals.com. I have a certain PHP file in my t

Answer 1

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING}  ^$
RewriteRule ^www\.animals\.com/lion$ /www.animals.com/database/?animal=lion [R=301,NE,NC,L]

Just use this code. I hope that it will works.

Answer 2

URL rewriting wouldn't work for me, neither by calling add_filter('rewrite_rules_array', function() {}), nor by calling add_rewrite_rule(). Apparently that was because filter 'rewrite_rules_array' was never triggered when opening frontend website pages, so the rewrites weren't generated.

The solution was to go to admin area and just open page Settings -> Permalinks. I need to do that every time I want to change my rewrites.

I don't know if vanilla Wordpress works like that, this is probably caused by an plugin/theme a have installed.

Answer 3

WordPress puts a global redirect on root for everything unidentified i.e. not an existing file or a folder to its /index.php. You on the other hand now want to redirect them to ?animal=unidentified. So, unless the list of animal keywords is fixed any solution proposed could mess up your WordPress.

If you had like 10-odd animals you could add them like below to your .htaccess (at root /)

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /

RewriteRule ^(lion|leopard|tiger|dog|cat)/?$ database/?animal=$1 [NC,L]

# WordPress rules come here

For 40-odd animals I would suggest you to have a directory (need not exist) prefix for your animals.

RewriteRule ^a/(.+?)/?$ database/?animal=$1 [NC,L]

This would redirect any /a/critter to database/?animal=critter and you won't have to add them to your .htaccess manually any more. You could also have both the rules co-exist so that if you haven't modified .htaccess for /panther yet you could still access it at /a/panther.

EDIT:
Okay, I looked into it and it isn't possible without writing a PHP script to intercept this request and forward it to index.php. Here's how mutisite works: since, none of your rewrites match it goes to index.php; the entry point for WordPress's php code. Somewhere deep, the code checks the REQUEST_URI header to see if it matches one of your multisites (/dios) and if it does, forwards the request to the page configured (dios.php).

When we do an .htaccess redirect for /dioses/agni we're able to hit index.php (by removing the [L]) but the REQUEST_URI header still remains the same (/dioses/agni) and it has no mulisite configured for it. Hence, the redirection fails.

Answer 4

There is another way to solve it, without touching WordPress.

Add to .htaccess

RewriteRule ^lion /indexw.php?pagename=db&dios=$1 [L,E=URI:/detail/]

Create file indexw.php:

<?php $_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"] = $_SERVER["REDIRECT_URI"]; include("index.php");

How it works? mod_rewrite sets REDIRECT_URI as specified in E=URI:value argument. indexw.php just overwrites REQUEST_URI with correct value (Thanks to Ravi Thapliyal for an insight on this)