help with setup of .htaccess file redirects - php

Question

I need help configuring my .htaccess file to handle redirects properly.
Here’s what I need to have happen. Stackoverflow's spam filter wouldn't allow me to post the full domain. So where I say "DOMAIN" you can substitue "domain.com". (I also needed to add and extra t to the http.)
Requests for the DOMAIN/page version of the file should be redirected to www.DOMAIN/page.
Requests for the 'friendly' versions of the URLS should be allowed. So a file that is really at www.DOMAIN/index.php?q=37 should be viewable by going to www.DOMAIN/latest-news
I have a big list of 301 redirects. We recently changed the site from an .asp based CMS to one written in PHP.
Example:
redirect 301 /overview.asp http://www.DOMAIN/overview
Items 1 and 2 are working fine.
However for item 3, if I put in a browser request for "http://www.DOMAIN/overview.asp" instead of redirecting to the friendly name of the file ("http://www.DOMAIN/overview") it will redirect to http://www.DOMAIN/index.php?q=overview.asp. This is the problem.
What do I need to change to get this working right?
My configuration is below:
## Fix Apache internal dummy connections from breaking [(site_url)] cache
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.*internal\ dummy\ connection.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]
## Exclude /assets and /manager directories and images from rewrite rules
RewriteRule ^(manager|assets)/*$ - [L]
RewriteRule \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif|ico)$ - [L]
## For Friendly URLs
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?q=$1 [L,QSA]
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.DOMAIN/$1 [R=301,L]
redirect 301 /overview.asp http://www.DOMAIN/overview
redirect 301 /news.asp http://www.DOMAIN/news
# ETC....
thanks!

Answer 1

Mod_rewrite is doing exactly what you're asking it to do ... (yes :-), that's often the problem with computers).
On the /overview.asp http://www.DOMAIN/overview line you're setting the browser to send out a brand new request from scratch, which starts the whole cycle again from the top and gets catched by the ^(.*)$ index.php?q=$1 directive.
Right before this line you should put another RewriteCond to prevent the ^(.*)$ rule to apply if REQUEST_FILENAME is either overview or news. You might also simply rewrite /overview.asp to overview [L] instead of redirecting.
If you can, set the RewriteLog directive to its highest verbosity and look at the logfile - it usually gives very good insights into what's really going on...
EDIT - if I get it right you shoud be doing this:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} ! \.asp$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} ! ^overview$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} ! ^news$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?q=$1 [L,QSA]
This would prevent any file already ending in .asp, plus those looking for overview and news, to be redirected toward index.php.
I suspect anyway that you got something backwards regarding that SEO stuff. You should indeed start from the structure of the query string that your scripts expect and use that as a base to build a sensible URL addressing schema.
EDIT #2:
There was a space too many between the bang mark ant the regex. The following code doesn't come from memory as the previous - I've tested on my local Apache and it does what's supposed to do (as long as I've understood correctly..)
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !\.asp$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !overview$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !news$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?q=$1 [L,QSA]
Hope this helps