HTML 5 Boilerplate HTACCESS Stopping my mod_rewrite from working

Question

I'm using HTML5 BP's .htaccess file unedited. Everything works fine until I add my own rewrite rule:

Options +FollowSymlinks

RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^([a-z]+-?[a-z]+)/$ /$1.php

this works fine if add it to it's own .htaccess file (after starting the engine and adding options) but does not when added to the html5 BP's file . I've tried placing it all over the document, inside the if tags, top of the doc and bottom.

I'd like the rewrite to load mydomain.com/example.php when a user inputs mydomain.com/example .

Answer 1

That expression won't match /example:

You've got the / on the end, not the beginning as you have in your replacement string. Given that it's in .htaccess, and assuming that example.php is in the same directory as this .htaccess file, then you don't want slashes at all. Clarify if this is not the case. And if you have access to the server config, then don't use .htaccess, period.

You've got the - as optional, but then you're forcing another one-or-more match of alphabetical characters, and you're forcing lower-case. This is far more complicated than it needs to be; how about this:

RewriteRule ^([\w-]+)$ $1.php