Temporary redirect 302 with .htaccess and mod-rewrite matching expression

Question

Hi! I'm trying to match a a bunch of redirects for my website with basically moved to a different folder on the server. I need to make http://www.site.com/index.php?page=anypage go to http://www.site.com/newfolder/index.php?page=anypage. The thing is http://www.site.com/index.php and http://www.site.com/index.php?page=home should remain untouched. How can I accomplish this?

I was trying the following in the .htaccess file, but I am affraid to make a mistake. I really don't know how to test this, either.

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on

RewriteRule ^/index.php?page=(.*)$ http://www.site.com/newfolder/index.php?page=$1 [R=302,NC]
RewriteRule ^/index.php?page=home http://www.site.com/index.php?page=home [R=302,NC,L]

Now I figured that this is temporary, so I should know ho to reverse it! The next week, the links will have to redirect again to the root server. Also, what should I do to re-establish the normal redirection??

Answer 1

If I've followed your scenario correctly, you want something like this:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !=""
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !page=home
RewriteRule ^index.php /newfolder/index.php [R,L]

As far as testing goes, I prefer to try rules out on a local test server. If you have full control over the server (as is the case locally), there are some mod_rewrite directives that help you log what's going on, and that can be helpful in debugging. The module documentation has more information about this.

Edit: When you want to switch back, modify the RewriteRule above like so:

RewriteRule ^newfolder/index\.php /index.php [R,L]