Unexpected results using .htaccess rewrites

Question

I'm working a multilingual site in EE and I am optimizing the URL's for SEO reasons in multi languages as well. The purpose is that people can visit the URL

http://www.domain.com/nl/contact/medewerkers and also http://www.domain.com/fr/contact/personnel

both pointing to the same templategroup 'medewerkers' (medewerkers is staff in English fyi)

Just to be complete: the switch of the language is triggered by the first segment in the URL and works fine

The idea was to have some entries in the .htaccess in the /fr subdir of the site to make the 'translation' of the URL to right template group.

So in this /fr/.htaccess I've specified

    RewriteRule ^contact/personnel$ contact/medewerkers

However for some reason this does not seem to work properly

Answer 1

It might be that this problem is bound to my server environment (although I was able to reproduce this locally with MAMP), but this is how I've got it solved after many hours of swearing.

In the /system/expressionengine/config/config.php file there is a setting the specify how EE should deal with URI's. In a standard EE setup this is specified as

$config['uri_protocol'] = 'AUTO';

Changing this to

$config['uri_protocol'] = 'PATH_INFO';

solved my problems and it might solve yours!

regards, Tim