Wordpress .htaccess preventing sub folder from rewriting its own urls - php

Question

So I have been looking all over for a while, and cannot seem to find a particular solution I am looking for. I have seen many articles showing how to fix problems with wordpress rewrite, but none fix my problem.
I currently have Wordpress Installed in my / Root directory. the .htaccess looks like this.
# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^manager - [L,NC] <-- I added this from other examples.
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress
So from what I can tell this tells wordpress, hey you will handle all the urls, for everything. forever. Seriously. For ever and everywhere :P
So the problem comes when I have a sub directory site.com/manager
Here I would like to build a similar URL capturing method to manage what the user gets to see/access/etc. The line I added to the root .htaccess file (from what I have read) is suppose to tell wordpress, hey don't touch my damn /manager folder.
Wordpress being the sneaky greedy caregiver that it is fails to listen. ill go to test my site.com/manager/test (grabbing test and pulling info from sql with it) and wordpress takes over and throws me to the wordpress 404 page.
my .htaccess in /manager is as follows for refrence, I am thinking I will need to do some rewrite stuffs here too, but for now just trying to prevent wordpress from being over bearing :).
DirectoryIndex index.php
<FilesMatch "\.(php|inc)$">
Order allow,deny
deny from all
</FilesMatch>
<FilesMatch "(index.php|logout.php)$">
Order allow,deny
allow from all
</FilesMatch>
Any ideas, thoughts, comments, concerns would be much appreciated.
Thank you.

Answer 1

SO after digging deeper and looking into this further I found a fix. Not sure it is the BEST solution but its working.
Root (/) .htaccess
#Manager - A customer content manager
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/manager/(.*)$ [OR]
RewriteRule ^.*$ - [L]
</IfModule>
#end Manager
# 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
This appears to over ride wordpress like needed.
Manager (/manager) .htaccess
DirectoryIndex index.php
<FilesMatch "\.(php|inc)$">
Order allow,deny
deny from all
</FilesMatch>
<FilesMatch "(index.php|logout.php|install.php)$">
Order allow,deny
allow from all
</FilesMatch>
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /manager/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . index.php [L]
</IfModule>
The top portion isn't required but I added this for file protection/security.
Summary:
I used the %{REQUEST_URI} to selectively remove a sub-folder, to apply this to more sub-folders I would add another
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/manager/(.*)$ [OR]
I then input the information in the sub-directory's .htaccess file for url rewriting. From here I can manipulate the URL converting it into a Array list for further sorting and database calling.