Redirect URLs with query strings in .htaccess

Question

I'm trying to migrate an old site to a new one built with concrete5. The old site uses query strings, which I cannot redirect from within concrete5.

1. There are multiple categories, how can I redirect just the query part?

   • Old URL: example.com/portfolio/category?cat=hifi
   • New URL: example.com/projecten/hifi

2. Further I have URLs with a different query also needing redirects:

   • Old URL: example.com/portfolio/post.php?s=pagename-xxx-xxx
   • New URL: example.com/projecten/pagename-xxx-xxx

Help very much appreciated!

Answer 1

You'll need to use mod_rewrite and a condition (RewriteCond) that matches against the QUERY_STRING server variable.

Try the following in your root .htaccess file above any existing mod_rewrite directives.

RewriteEngine On

# PART 1 : Redirect old category URLs
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^cat=(\w+)
RewriteRule ^portfolio/category$ /projecten/%1? [R=302,L]

# PART 2 : Redirect other old URLs
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^s=(pagename-\w{3}-\w{3})
RewriteRule ^portfolio/post\.php$ /projecten/%1? [R=302,L]

This assumes that the xxx in pagename-xxx-xxx are 3 literal word characters (ie. a-z, A-Z, 0-9 or _).

UPDATE#1: The trailing ? on the RewriteRule substitution is necessary in order to remove the query string from the target. Or, use the QSD flag on Apache 2.4+.

Change the 302 (temporary) redirect to 301 (permanent) when you are sure it's working OK. 301 redirects are cached by the browser, which can make testing problematic.

UPDATE#2: With respect to the updated URL in "PART 2", try the following instead:

# PART 2 : Redirect other old URLs
# To essentially remove the date prefix, eg. "YYYY-MM-DD-"
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^s=/d{4}-/d{2}-/d{2}-(.+)
RewriteRule ^portfolio/post\.php$ /projecten/%1? [R=302,L]

^s=[0-9{4}]+-(.+?)/?[0-9{2}]+-(.+?)/?[0-9{2}]+-(.+?)/?(.*)$

This is a bit of a mash, but also looks overly complex for what you are trying to achieve? For instance, why do you need to match an optional slash (ie. /?)? Your example URL does not contain any slashes?

A regex pattern such as [0-9{4}]+ isn't doing what you think it's doing. This would match any of the characters 0123456789{} 1 or more times. What you seem to be trying to do is to match exactly 4 digits. eg. [0-9]{4} (which is the same as /d{4}, using a shorthand character class).