WP 404s manual rewrites to index.php

[vinskapur]

On one of my sites, the permalink structure is set to /news/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ and its category base is /news/categories. I would like to add to and uncomplicate some of these rewrites for categories deserving of their own site sections - /music/, /onair/ etc - so I attempted to add the following rewrite in .htaccess as a starting point (before the WP block):

RewriteRule ^(news|onair|events|music)/?$ /index.php?category_name=$1 [QSA,L]

This rewrite actually works on the server side (ie /music/ rewrites to /index.php?category_name=music), but something in WordPress throws up the is_404() flag and it returns a file not found error page. I haven't found that something.

[foolswisdom]

My guess is that you need to make that rewrite rule external.

Closing as invalid for now.

[vinskapur]

Replying to foolswisdom:

My guess is that you need to make that rewrite rule external.

External how? If you mean external as in separate from WP_Rewrite, it already is a separate rule in .htaccess from the WordPress catch-all block - just WordPress appears to be overriding it regardless.

[markjaquith]

You should use WP's interal rewriting engine to avoid these issues.

[foolswisdom]

Replying to vinskapur:

Replying to foolswisdom:

My guess is that you need to make that rewrite rule external.

External how? If you mean external as in separate from WP_Rewrite, it already is a separate rule in .htaccess from the WordPress catch-all block - just WordPress appears to be overriding it regardless.

External rewrite as in:
RewriteRule ^(news|onair|events|music)/?$ /index.php?category_name=$1 [QSA,R,L]

The Rrrr is important.

[vinskapur]

Replying to foolswisdom:

The Rrrr is important.

Gosh, that just isn't pretty. I guess I'll have to try and play around with the internal rewrite engine. (I still think it's a defect that said engine is overriding explicit rewrites, mind.)