mod_rewrite is a notoriously fiendish chunk of software, almost legendarily so among web developers. I’ve got by with snippets in my .htaccess file, stuff that makes sure there’s no “www” in the URL, and managing holding pages. I absorbed a lot of how it works, but I couldn’t readily construct my own rewrites.
Until tonight.
I was forced to solve a situation involving a WordPress site which had some legacy flat HTML content. Way back when, I hacked it to use .html suffixes on the WP URLs, so we didn’t lose any search engine juice for the old URLs. This necessitated changing core WP code—always a bad idea—and thus blocked any automatic WP upgrade process. Which is a pain.
So, I’ve removed the .html hack, and tried to pull flat HTML content in for the old stuff, under the guise of smooth new .html-free URLs.
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