Can anyone tell me what's wrong with my mod_rewrite rule?
fyi: my host does support .htaccess and the mod_rewrite module is installed according to phpinfo().

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/([a-zA-Z0-9-]+)/?$ page.php?page=$1 [L]

what i'm trying to achieve is to allow a user to go to
www.mydomain.com/[username] which uses this page www.mydomain.com/page.php?page=[username]

is it because i'm using the root level and should be using a subdirectory?

if it isn't obvious i'm close to clueless about anything to do with .htaccess but from the handful of tutorials i have found there should be nothing wrong with my rule.

any input would be great.
cheers folks.


;purk

The following should work if you stick it in Root

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(.*) page.php?page=$1

or better still use a more descriptive rewrite such as

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^descriptivewords/descriptivewords/(.*) page.php?page=$1

where you substitute descriptivewords for your keywords.

I tried your suggestion but I still just get a 404!

This is very strange. Any other ideas?

Try adding a 'Options FollowSymLinks' to the top.

Some servers already have this set so you don't need to declare it.

Try it - should work if its installed on your server.

nope, still get 404. i'm chatting with my host support, they clearly have no idea other than mod_rewrite is enabled.

this is what i have

Options FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(.*) page.php?page=$1

Could it be that my attribute name a page name are the same? that would be a strange quirk.

Thanks for your input thus far!

You could check your server yourself using <?php phpinfo() ?> and look if mod_rewrite is enabled.

yep, it is loaded under the apache loaded modules section.

my host company says 'there is a problem with your syntax' but they also say they don't know what it is!

I found a very simple example which looks like this

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^test.php$ page.php

so when i visit mydomain.com/test.php i should see the content of mydomain.com/page.php but instead i get that darn 404

fyi: test.php does not exist but page.php does.

THIS ISSUE IS NOW SOLVED!

Thanks to maxxximus for the help.

For anyone who's new to mod_rewrite (like me) the issue was that I had defined an option (followsymlinks) before initiating the rewriteengine.

Seems so obvious now after 1.5 days head scratching and reference document reading.