mod_rewrite Yet Again

[Frank Hagan]

OK, I'm trying to rewrite URLs like this:

http://www.site.com/index.php?option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=27
http://www.site.com/index.php?option=com_virtuemart

To show this in the address bar:

http://www.site.com/store/Itemid=27
http://www.site.com/store

Here's what I have in .htaccess:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^store(/)?$ ^index.php?option=com_virtuemart([0-9]+)-([a-z]+)

Does not work, but I'm obviously not getting how this thing works. Any help on this one from you mod_rewrite gurus out there?

[JackT]

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^store$ index.php?option=com_virtuemart
RewriteRule ^store/Itemid=([0-9]+)$ index.php??option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=$1

I wrote two lines so it wouldn't have been a mess.

For the first chunk of RewriteRule, you need to 'capture' a group of characters (with parenthesis) to be reused as variables for the next part. Second part names the variables starting from $1 by the position of the parenthesis.

The 2 question marks are new to be as well, after a quick search for them.

[AndyP]

Joomla will mod_rewrite your urls automatically if you go to site->global configuration->Seo->search engine friendly URLs and click "yes" then rename htaccess.txt to .htaccess in the root of your joomla installation.

[Frank Hagan]

Joomla will mod_rewrite your urls automatically if you go to site->global configuration->Seo->search engine friendly URLs and click "yes" then rename htaccess.txt to .htaccess in the root of your joomla installation.

Right, but usually all that does is replace the "unfriendly" elements with pretend directories ... so "htp://www.site.com/index.php?option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=27" becomes something like "htp://www.site.com/index.php/option/com/virtuemart/Itemid/27"

Thanks everyone for the help ... the solutions didn't seem to work to change the words "com_virtuemart" to "store", but the customer has decided he doesn't really care that much about it. So I dodged the bullet this time!

[Dr. Jones]

I think Jack was on the right track; he just had two question marks on the second RewriteRule line, and seemed to be missing the leading slash. I also added /? to the regex of the first rule, to make it work for www.site.com/store/ or www.site.com/store (i provided for an optional trailing slash).

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/store/?$ /index.php?option=com_virtuemart
RewriteRule ^/store/Itemid=([0-9]+)$ index.php?option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=$1

no guarantees this will work, as i'm not a mod_rewrite guru by any stretch of the imagination, but it oughtta be worth a shot

EDIT: i just noticed this thread is like two months old. oops!

[Frank Hagan]

Thanks, Dr. Jones. The customer doesn't mind the "virtuemart" id in the URL, so I have stopped tinkering on that particular site.