Apache Rewrite Rules

caterham_www probably has given you the answer you need to fix your problem. But to assist you a little, if you have moved your wordpress install to the root before you edited the url of the blog in the admin area, you will now need to use wp-login.php to correctly log back in instead of just wp-admin.

Examle: http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-login.php

Then under the main menu Settings, goto General.

Change both the wordpress address and the blog address to the correct location of your install. It will immediately log you out and make you log back in. But your pages should work correctly again with the mod rewrite you currently have in your htaccess. But remove the code you see below from your htacess file.

If you are still seeing the 404 errors, please check Settings > Permalinks. Be sure that Custom Structure is selected and you are using a permalink structure such as /%category%/%postname%/  which is what your htaccess is set up for.
caterham_www probably has given you the answer you need to fix your problem. But to assist you a little, if you have moved your wordpress install to the root before you edited the url of the blog in the admin area, you will now need to use wp-login.php to correctly log back in instead of just wp-admin.

Examle: http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-login.php

Then under the main menu Settings, goto General.

Change both the wordpress address and the blog address to the correct location of your install. It will immediately log you out and make you log back in. But your pages should work correctly again with the mod rewrite you currently have in your htaccess.

If you are still seeing the 404 errors, please check Settings > Permalinks. Be sure that Custom Structure is selected and you are using a permalink structure such as /%category%/%postname%/  which is what your htaccess is set up for.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} =POST
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} .wp-comments-post\.php
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !http://www.example.org/ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} =""
RewriteRule ^ http://%{REMOTE_ADDR}/ [R=301,L]
 
# redirect /blog/foo --> /foo
RewriteRule ^blog/?(.*) http://www.exmpl.com/$1 [R=301,L]
 
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule !^index\.php$ /index.php [L]

                                              

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Ok, first, I want to apologize for how long it took me to reply...Sorry, I just have a very busy life.

Anyway, Yes, I did configure WP not to use /blog/ anymore, but all those links are still out there in Yahoo! and Google from where they crawled the site in the past.

Next...I put "Options +FollowSymlinks" in .htaccess because my hosting company uses FP extensions and I didn't want to corrupt the server files by turning on permalinks in WP, but maybe I didn't need that in there. I got that piece of information from the WP codex.  Btw, I don't use FP and I can't stand it, much rather use notepad!

Can you please explain to my slow self what:
Options All
Options -Indexes

actually does? Maybe then I can understand what part of it I need.

Thanks for the info about <files>, I have fixed that problem.

I also implemented the other changes mentioned, and all is working well. Now I just need to figure out something about WP. Before I changed to permalinks, a post was here: http://www.exmpl.com/blog/archives/1553

Now, my posts are here: http://www.exmpl.com/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%-%-post_id%

So, not only has '/blog/' changed to '/' (we have corrected that with the Rewrite Rule)

'/archives/'   has changed to  '/2009/08/'

... and

name.com/xxxx/xx/post_id   has changed to name.com/xxxx/xx/postname-post_id

I now have dead links with the following structure:
http://www.exmpl.com/archives/1553  (the link actually contains /blog/ but we are stripping that off already)
we actually need to change /archives/ to /year/monthnum/  and 1553 needs to be changed to the actual new post name of: %postname%-%-post_id%

If you would rather not help with all this stuff, I can understand because you have already kinda answered my question.

> Can you please explain to my slow self what:
Options All
Options -Indexes

actually does? Maybe then I can understand what part of it I need.


It enables all options except MultiViews as described here: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/core.html#options and disables Indexes (directory index listing) again.

Probably you don't want all options for security rasons; I'd suggest to remove both lines and replace them with

Options FollowSymLinks

This disables all otzher options and enables FollowSymLinks only (not the missing plus sign = override instead of add). FollowSymLinks is neded in order to use mod_rewrite in .htaccess files.


> name.com/xxxx/xx/post_id   has changed to name.com/xxxx/xx/postname-post_id

You can't get the postname into mod_rewrite without using a RewriteMap (access to httpd.conf needed). It is not a part of the old URL, so we can't extract the name from there. An other way would be ro "hardcode" each name, but that might result in xyz rules.

I'd suggest to rewrite to a local php script where you analyze the input URL-path (or a queryString variable passed by mod_rewrit to your script), make a database lookup to get the name, convert the name (e.g. spaces into hyphen as done by wordpress etc.) construct the full URL (with scheme+hostname to be RFC compliant) and to do a redirect from within PHP (header() function).

Options FollowSymlinks
 
ErrorDocument 404 /dir/dir/dir/404.php
 
AuthName "Restricted Area" 
AuthType Basic 
AuthUserFile /home/content/s/f/r/h-m/.htpasswd 
AuthGroupFile /dev/null 
<files wp-login.php>
require valid-user
</files>
 
# there are no slashs in <files>, <files> can't match folders.
<files wp-admin>
require valid-user
</files>
<files wp-config.php>
Order deny,allow
deny from all
</files>
 
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} =POST
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} .wp-comments-post\.php
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !http://www.example.org/ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} =""
RewriteRule ^ http://%{REMOTE_ADDR}/ [R=301,L]
 
# rewrite to a local script
RewriteRule ^blog/archives/([0-9]+)$ /lookup_archive.php?id=$1 [L]
 
# redirect /blog/foo --> /foo
RewriteRule ^blog/?(.*) http://www.exmpl.com/$1 [R=301,L]
 
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule !^index\.php$ /index.php [L]

                                              

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@ Dzynit: Thank you for your response, however you are correct...I had already made the changes that you mentioned before I actually got to this point, but I am still having the problem listed below with %post_id%

@ caterham_www: Thank you for your assistance. You have definiately set me in the right direction. You gave me enough info to help me finish the rest, w/ the exception listed below.

@ both EXPERTS: I am gonna go ahead and close this question awarding the points to caterham_www, and I'm gonna move my problem listed below to a new question. If either one of you guys wants to snatch up that new question and help me code a PHP script as caterham_www mentioned...or if there is a better way to do it, you guys can help me there.

Ok, this is what I've ended up with following caterham_www's suggestions:

Options FollowSymlinks

<files> and other stuff here ... then:
##
## Redirect(s) for: /blm/ | /archives/tag/ | /archives/category/ | /archives/date/
##
RewriteRule ^blog/?(.*) http://www.exmpl.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^archives/tag/?(.*) http://www.www.exmpl.com</SPAN>/tag/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^archives/category/?(.*) http://www.www.exmpl.com</SPAN>/category/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^archives/date/?(.*) www.exmpl.com [R=301,L]


I guess these would be the remaining problems:
Any url that is looking up a particular post_id e.g.:

http://www.exmpl.com/blog/archives/1223 or
http://www.exmpl.com/blog/archives/1223/comment-page-1</SPAN> etc., etc.

Thanks again for all the help/suggestions thus far. You guys are a tremendous help!

You should avoid issuing multiple redirects, i.e. from /blog/archives/tag/ to /archives/tag/; /archives/tag/ to /tag/. If /archives/tag/ was never out in the wild (but only /blog/archives/tag/) you should change the rewrite rule to ^blog/archives/tag/...... and put it above of the general "RewriteRule ^blog/?(.*) ....." to avoid multiple redirects for search engines (human users wouldn't care/notice).

So, your saying that I should change this:
RewriteRule ^blog/?(.*) http://www.exmpl.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^archives/tag/?(.*) http://www.www.exmpl.com/tag/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^archives/category/?(.*) http://www.www.exmpl.com/category/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^archives/date/?(.*) www.exmpl.com [R=301,L]

to this: ?
RewriteRule ^blog/archives/category/?(.*) http://www.www.exmpl.com/category/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^blog/archives/tag/?(.*) http://www.www.exmpl.com/tag/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^blog/archives/date/?(.*) www.exmpl.com [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^blog/?(.*) http://www.exmpl.com/$1 [R=301,L]


What I did was this: I went out to Google and tried to check as many dead links as I could. Also, I have google custom search on my site, so I searched for words, tags and categories that I knew were on the site and just followed those links. Thats how I came up with the different RewriteRule(s).

Tell me if this update looks better.

I know this, just adding the first one that we had did not fix all my dead links.

The first one we had was:

# redirect /blog/foo --> /foo
RewriteRule ^blog/?(.*) http://www.exmpl.com/$1 [R=301,L]

P.S. We are only fixing links that people would come across on the search engines...

All the links on the actual site are working w/o any re-directs, so after Google and Yahoo! update their SERPS, we won't even need any of this. This is more of a temporary work-around.

> to this: ?

Yes. This will cause only one redirect, directly to the correct resource.