htaccess redirect on mvc framework - php

Question

I am working on the htaccess file for my mvc site. The software that the company purchased for the site works only without the www, so I was able to fix up the htaccess to allow www in the URL since most of our affiliates are going to try to use it anyway. However, this renders the siteurl.org/index.php/admin and the siteurl.org/index.php/members unreachable. I'm trying to exclude these URL's from the www forward to non-www but everything I know and can find seems to relate to non-MVC sites, and it seems that mvc sites are set up differently across the board so the examples I'm finding aren't working for me.
Here's my current htaccess (I had to comment out the forwarding lines to allow admins to access the admin section and affiliates to access the member section)
<Files ~ "serial.txt$">
Order allow,deny
Deny from all
</Files>
RewriteEngine On
#RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\. [NC]
#RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^aff/(.*)$ /index.php/aff/?aff=$1 [R,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [R=301,NC]
If it could be addressed at the same time, I'd also love a pointer on how to clean up that URL so that we could type in siteurl.org/admin as opposed to siteurl.org/index.php/admin (same for members), and also to show the affiliate name in the URL (it's currently cleaning up the URL to remove the /aff/affiliateusername but affiliates would like to see their name in the URL). If anybody has a great link to specific resources on writing htaccess for MVC I would be eternally grateful. Thank you in advance for any assistance.

Answer 1

Let's be clear on three things before going into explanations:
Apache doesn't have a care in the world whether your site is built on the MVC approach/design pattern or not. It. Doesn't. Even. See. It. To it, it sees htaccess mod_rewrite rules.
Whoever puts a serial code in serial.txt on the root is just begging for it to get nicked using a file include vulnerability in PHP.
This is suspiciously similar to CodeIgniter in rewrite rules.
Now. Your rules:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\. [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]
This rule will match only if the http host does not start with www. . If this is true, then it'll redirect to the http ://www. version.
Based on your description, you want the opposite: Your CMS does not work with www.. So, you will want this:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\. [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://mydomain/$1 [R=302, L]
Note that you'll need to hardcode your domain in there. Sucks.
Next set of rules:
RewriteRule ^aff/(.*)$ /index.php/aff/?aff=$1 [R,L]
This is bog-standard - redirects aff/whatever to /index.php/aff/?aff=$1
For the future, change it to this:
RewriteRule ^aff/(.*)$ /index.php?/aff/?aff=$1 [L]
This will clean up the URL and prevent an Apache rewrite cycle.
Next one:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [R=301,NC]
These will wildcard-match anything that does not exist. Same thing as before, change the last line to this:
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php?$1 [L]
This will, again, make the rewrite transparent.
P.S: get a real CMS developer. 301s are hardly useful.