htaccess: need help hiding index.php and doing a redirect without conflict?

Question

I need to redirect a page on a client site to an outside URL. I have been using the following redirect, which works - sort of:

redirect 301 /durhamchapelhill http://gds.chapelhilluumc.org

The problem is that the resulting URL is cluttered:

http://gds.chapelhilluumc.org/?/durhamchapelhill

I sought help on StackOverflow and got a really good redirect

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

RewriteRule ^durhamchapelhill$ http://gds.chapelhilluumc.org [R]

By itself, it does an awesome job and returns a nice clean URL. Which brings up the thorny issue of hiding the index.php page.

Before all of this started I was using the following to hide index.php and it works great:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php?/$1 [L]

The problem is I need both (hide index.php and redirect).

Here is the combination I tried:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

RewriteRule ^durhamchapelhill$ http://gds.chapelhilluumc.org [R]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php?/$1 [L]

However, if I combine the two rules the redirect fails.

Is there an htaccess doctor in the house that can assist with setting this straight?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Here are three variations to try:

RewriteRule ^durhamchapelhill$ http://gds.chapelhilluumc.org [R,L]

OR

RewriteRule ^durhamchapelhill http://gds.chapelhilluumc.org [R,L]

OR

RewriteRule ^durhamchapelhill(.*)$ http://gds.chapelhilluumc.org$1 [R,L]