Problem creating friendly SEO URLs on local server

Question

I'm having problems implementing friendly SEO urls on my local (Mac OS X Snow Leopard) development server.

*Note: site.com is just an example

(1) Currently my site's root is set up with a virtual host pointing to a sub-directory of my Sites folder.

(2) Pages are currently being accessed in the following format: http://site.com/index.php?page=login

(3) I want to implement SEO as something like: http://site.com/login

(4) I've edited my personal apache configuration to include AllowOverride All

(5) I've created an .htaccess file called site_com.htaccess and placed it into the document root of site.com. The content of this file is:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(.*).html /index.php?page=$1

(6) I've then restarted apache with sudo apachectl restart

What have I done wrongly?

Answer 1

Rename the file from site_com.htaccess to simply .htaccess.

Answer 2

You're having problems applying your rewrite rules.

Use something like this:

// if not a file
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-f
// if not a directory
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-d
// pass all params back to index.php
// QSA stands for query string append
// L stands for last rule
RewriteRule (.*) index.php?$1 [QSA,L]

And here is the manual for future reference! ;)