mod_rewrite seems to be ignoring condition statements

Question

I'm dying on this htaccess:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^[www\.]?old\.com [NC]  
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^.+$  
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^wp-admin  
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^index  
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^subdomain  
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.new.com/%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]  

I'm trying to redirect all traffic from www.old.com to www.new.com EXCEPT when they access:

www.old.com
old.com
old.com/wp-admin
old.com/subdomain

I still want the old site to show up and be able to administer it, but any old.com/something should be redirected to new.com/something.

That's the other thing, I couldn't get this to work by using $1 as a backreference. I had to hard-code the %{REQUEST_URI} in there instead (which worked).

The last exmaple (old.com/subdomain) is a second website entirely and I don't want to interfere with its operation either.

I've read so, so many websites and every variation makes perfect sense from a regular expression point of view and they all should work, but they don't. This is driving me crazy.

Answer 1

Try these rules in your .htaccess:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?old\.com$ [NC]  
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/?(wp-admin|index|subdomain) [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.+)$ http://www.new.com/$1 [R=301,L,QSA,NE]

Let me know if it doesn't work.