I always suggest Linux hosting for any OpenCart installations. The main OC developers either don’t know much about Windows IIS or neglect to include the necessary SEO URL configuration file for it to work.
This omission results in “not found” 404 (dead link) errors when you visit a page with an SEO URL assigned after enabling SEO URLs in your OpenCart store settings.
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If you’re like me, you don’t like cluttering your main folder with unnecessary files. This is why I hate that some browsers are still looking for ‘favicon.ico’ in the main folder even when you indicate in <head> that’s not where the agent should be looking…
Here is a way to eliminate those PITA 404’s from your error logs… Continue reading
Just a quick snippet showing how to force the HTTPS protocol (SSL) and the “www” sub-domain…
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80 [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\. [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.mydomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
There are other ways to achieve the same result, but I find this method is clean and requires the least amount of overhead to incorporate.
Another simple one.
The following code checks to see if the request is for a real directory or file and reroutes the request to “/myscript.php” if not.
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ myscript.php?/$1 [L]
</IfModule>
Take note of the the excamation point (it means “not”). To do the opposite (reroute valid directory/file requests through a script) just change the rewrite conditions (RewriteCond) to…
Short and sweet.
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]
</IfModule>
And if you want to remove the “www” portion, just change the condition (RewriteCond) and rule (RewriteRule)…
You may ask “Why should I do this?” and the asnwers are simple. It promotes linking uniformity and ensures you don’t end up being negatively affected by having “duplicate content” across (sub)domains in search engine indexes.
I was tinkering around with a CodeIgniter project earlier today and at some point, I needed to use PHP’s file_exists() function. I tend to use $_SERVER[‘DOCUMENT_ROOT’] for my starting location for finding files located in the web-viewable areas (makes sense huh?). This makes it easy to get the file url by simply replacing the document_root from the path of the filename which results in a nice absolute path for linking. In this particular instance, I was checking for an image to show in place of a heading tag. Granted the code was simple and straight forward, but it could not get PHP to locate the file and I knew it was there.
I recently had the need to redirect one query string to another query string. The reason for this was we created a new item in our Zen Cart software that took the place of 3 other items. To make sure the search engines and our visitors reached the new product instead of the old ones, the following code was used to redirect them accordingly.