.htaccess fix for a pretty permalink in PHP?

Question

Maybe I'm going about this in the wrong way, but I have some pages in our homegrown CMS that I want to convert to using pretty permalinks. Currently, their page URLs look this this:

http://ourdomain.com/articles/?permalink=blah-blah-blah

I want to convert these to:

http://ourdomain.com/articles/blah-blah-blah

I have a column in the db for permalinks, that when the article is created, automatically converts the title to a permalink.

How would I write the rewrite rule to accomplish this? Is this even the best way to accomplish this?

Answer 1

If there's nothing in the query string you can omit QSA:

RewriteRule articles/(.+) articles/?permalink=$1 [QSA,L,B]