Htaccess redirects

[ThomasHarvey]

Annoyingly it's time to play with this beast again.

I've been given the task of doing the following.

Keeping the homepage live

Redirecting categories to the specific categories on the new site

Catch all redirects

Now i've managed to setup the specific categories and the catch all redirects, however I am unsure how to keep the homepage live (which is like this:www.domain.com/ so I can't just exclude that?)

Would appreciate any help.

[ThomasHarvey]

Got around this by adding catch alls for a-z/0-9.

RewriteRule ^a(.*) http://www.domain.com? [R=301,NE,NC,L]

This meant that the homepage wasn't being touched. However I did lose all of the category specific redirects. I'm sure there was a way around this however I don't know htaccess to do this well enough. Would be interesting if anyone would know how to do all three?

[Tom-Anthony]

If I have understood it correctly, you want:

• To redirect certain category pages to new category pages on a new domain.
• Redirect all other pages to the homepage on a new domain
• Not to redirect the homepage and for that to stay on the current domain.

If so I think this should probably do what you want:

RewriteRule ^$ - [L]
RewriteRule categoryA/ http://www.newdomain.com/newcategoryA/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule (.+) http://www.newdomain.com/ [R=301,L]

The first rule says "if this is the homepage stop evaluating rules". The second maps a category page over to the new version and stops evaluating rules; you'll need to duplicate this one for all the specific categories. The last rule is your catch-all rule for redirecting everything else to the homepage of the new domain.

If you want to easily test/check then I highly recommend this .htaccess checker tool.

Good luck!