Wordpress .htaccess\domain name trouble - php

Question

Got pulled in the last second because someone made a minor tweak to a WP site of ours and removed "www." (or so I am told) from the url. Now the page can only be reached by typing in wxyz.com (example). So, I speculated it was a .htaccess write and told my friend who is attached to that project about it. He agreed to try, but handed it off to me due to time constraints.
So I looked at it- for some 3hrs. An amazingly simple little problem and clearly I am missing something.
The other developer said all he did was add:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^kokonut\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://kokonut.com/$1 [R=301,L]
But none of my code or tweaks to his would change anything, first of all. The site wouldn't ever work.
Secondly, WP has a front end system to change the url's so after this failed I thought "well, ok, I'll just go there and say "www" in front. That broke everything, the admin panel wouldn't even work anymore!
So I had to go into wp-config.php and explicitly say:
define('WP_HOME','http://wxyz.com');
define('WP_SITEURL','http://wxyz.com');
But this was just getting back to where we started! Further, without that code up there sometimes the site just won't work whatsoever.
The current .htaccess file is as written (which is DIFFERENT than his original, apparently WP overwrote it but restoring it to how it was won't do much of anything either or so it appears to me. Honestly at this point I may be running myself in circles.):
# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress
How it was when I was first assigned to "fix" it:
# 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]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^wxyz\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://wxyz.com/$1 [R=301,L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress
So what am I missing here? Obviously he could change it from www --> nothing without a problem, why is reverting it back so arduous?
I've never worked on this site, this server or with this group before. So this is a first. I've dabbled with .htaccess but I'm not "an expert", if I were I would certainly not be in this pickle!
Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

Not sure if this is the source of your issues, but one big problem is that wordpress has a routing rule (RewriteRule . /index.php [L]) and then you have a redirect rule RewriteRule (.*) http://wxyz.com/$1 [R=301,L], which is fine, except that you're redirecting after you route. External redirects must happen before the server internally routes things. Additionally, wordpress will overwrite the rules that are inbetween the # BEGIN/END WordPress comments. So if you don't want wordpress to overwrite rules that you add, you need to include them outside of that block:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^wxyz\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://wxyz.com/$1 [R=301,L]
</IfModule>
# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress