I've taken over a former site/domain, and set up a new site using Wordpress. The WP installation rewrites URL's to static ones, as you'd expect it to.
At the same time I want to preserve the former pages, as they have incoming links. I'm not interested in 301'ing them to "new" pages.
The old URL structure is /index.php?id=123, which I suspect is causing the problem with the WP .htaccess file. For reference, this is what it looks like:
# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress
I've tried adding the following:
RewriteRule ^([0-9]+).html index.php?id=$1 [R,L]
Doesn't work. Just redirects to site.com/?id=123 and shows the front page.
I should add that I plan on just adding these new pages as regular static HTML files in the format of 123.html, 321.html etc.
How do I use .htaccess to make this work together with the WP installation and what WP puts into the .htaccess file?
To clarify:
I want to have my 123.html static HTML page be index.php?id=123. When you access index.php?id=123 it should bring up 123.html, but show index.php?id=123 in the address bar. If you access 123.html it should 301 to index.php?id=123.
To map an URL with a querystring up to an actual file you'll need to use a RewriteCond to match the querystring itself (as RewriteRule doesn't):
Something along these lines ought to do it:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
# retrieve X.html when index.php?id=X is requested
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} index\.php
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^id=([0-9]+)$
RewriteCond %1.html -F
RewriteRule .* %1.html? [L]
# standard WordPress routing
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
This will first check to see if you've got a request for index.php with a querystring like id=X.
Then it'll check to see if a file called X.html actually exists; I'm not 100% happy about having to use the more system hungry subrequest file check -F rather than the standard -f but I can't see a way around it in .htaccess in this case.
If X.html actually exists, it'll fetch that file whilst leaving the URL as index.php?id=X.
However if that file doesn't exist it'll fall back to standard WordPress no file, no directory routing to index.php
I'm not a WordPress expert but that should work; I guess the main WordPress controller uses $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] to determine the action.
Note: This won't, however, prevent people from accessing 123.html directly by going to the URL www.site.com/123.html - I kept falling into infinite loops and Apache 500 errors trying to prevent that :|