I had posted this question a bit ago but probably didn't articulate it quite right to get a good answer. I'm stumped on something I thought would be easy ..
So... I've got old urls that are no longer active (but were indexed in search engines) in the form of:
www.site.com/something?view=123
Where... the 123 in the query string matches up to an equivalent page on a search engine optimized site ... the domain is the same because nameservers have been swapped over, but we know the old links are indexed so we want folks to be able to get the equivalent pages on the new site which are in form:
www.site.com/index.php/one-thing-or-another/and-something-else
...so, the exercise is "based on the id number in the old query string, point to a new page which is both completely unrelated in terms of path, filename, etc and extensionless.
I think I've concluded that mod_rewrite "can" do this, thought is must be done in a pair of rules rather than one, but I've hit a wall trying to make it work. For each of a few dozen sites, I have about a half dozen of these that need to be redirected to a new page based on a different id number in the old url..
Any help much appreciated .. I've read the apache mod_rewrite docs and every tutorial I could find, but can't seem to get over the hump!
cheers all,
Jim