Perch Runway and URL Rewriting

Is the built in routing able to cope with this? Reading through the docs (and the blog post), I couldn't really figure out whether it could cope with this.

Yep - I'm looking to redirect URLs like "/shop/hats/trucker-hat" to "/product?t=hats&h=trucker-hat" - sorry for the confusion!

Hi Drew,

Unfortunately, I can't use the R flag as it changes the URL in the browser, which is why I was looking for a rewrite (and redirect) rather than just a redirect.

Is this achievable in Runway?

No worries.

When a visitor reaches the site, and clicks on a product (let's say the "Trucker Hat" product), I would like to use an SEO-friendly URL like /shop/hats/trucker-hat.

However, in the back end, that's not a real file path - the actual page is product.php.

product.php contains code to break up a query string and fetch the appropriate product. It expects a URL like this: /product?t=hats&h=trucker-hat.

The .htaccess rule I've written for this is:

RewriteRule ^shop/([A-Za-z0-9-]+)/([A-Za-z0-9-]+)/?$ product?t=$1&h=$2 [NC]

This would be ideal, as it would maintain the friendly URL in the browser but actually send the visitor to the unfriendly URL, because it's a RewriteRule - am I correct in saying that that's how Rewrite works in .htaccess?

Either way, I've used this testing tool (https://htaccess.mwl.be/) and confirmed that the rule I've written works as expected.

However, when I put the rule into my htaccess file, which also contains the Perch Runway htaccess code,(below):

# Perch Runway
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/cms 
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
#RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule .* /cms/core/runway/start.php [L]

it doesn't work.

Here is my full htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On

# HTB - /shop/ to /product
RewriteRule ^shop/([A-Za-z0-9-]+)/([A-Za-z0-9-]+)/?$ product?t=$1&h=$2 [NC]

# Perch Runway
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/cms 
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
#RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule .* /cms/core/runway/start.php [L]

I tried using your suggestion of:

RewriteRule ^shop/([A-Za-z0-9-]+)/([A-Za-z0-9-]+)/?$ product?t=$1&h=$2 [NC,R,L]

but that caused the URL to change (and actually still didn't work, taking me to a file path from the root of the server, but I'm sure it would have worked after some tweaking). We need the URL to not change from the friendly URL.

Did that clarify things?

Is this possible in Perch Runway?

Awesome!

Are you able to provide an example of how I'd get /shop/hats/trucker-hat to point to /product?t=hats&h=trucker-hat?

I'm struggling to get to grips with it just from the docs, I'm afraid!