htaccess - Redirects with more than 1 level deep not working

Question

Just moved to shared hosting on GoDaddy and Im trying to get my .htaccess rules working.

Heres what I have:

ErrorDocument 404 /error.php
Options FollowSymLinks

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.mydomain\.org$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://mydomain.org/$1 [R=301,L]

RewriteRule ^view/(\w+)$ viewitem.php?itemid=$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^category/(\w+)$ viewcategory.php?tag=$1 [R=301,L]

RewriteRule ^faq$ faq.php
RewriteRule ^about$ about.php
RewriteRule ^contact$ contact.php
RewriteRule ^submit$ submit.php
RewriteRule ^contactmsg$ handler-contact.php

All the pages @ the root of the domain seem to be working i.e mydomain.org/faq, mydomain.org/about are working.

But whenever I try mydomain.org/category/somecategory, I get a 404. How can I fix my .htaccess to obey these rules that are more than 1 level deep?

Thanks,

EDIT: I have fixed the rules by changing them to the following:

RewriteRule ^view/(.*)$ viewitem.php?itemid=$1
RewriteRule ^category/(.*)$ viewcategory.php?tag=$1

Can anyone confirm/deny that this is the proper way to fix this?

Answer 1

The new way you're doing it (with (.*)) is correct.