Appending query parameter to Woocommerce category URL - wordpress

Question

I'm trying to force display the list view in my Woocommerce store but I can't seem to get it working.
The theme has support for list view and you can force it by appending "?product_view=list" so a category URL becomes:
http://subliminalscience.com/product-category/icbch-hypnosis-certification/?product_view=list
Instead of the default one:
http://subliminalscience.com/product-category/icbch-hypnosis-certification/
I added this Rewrite Rule to my htaccess but it doesnt:
RewriteRule ^product-category(.*)$ http://subliminalscience.com/product-category$1?product_view=list
It seems Wordpress ignores this Rewrite rule. Any ideas?

Answer 1

I'm surprised this answer stands as the only one.
Making changes in .htaccess to force this sort of behaviour seems really unnecessary and obviously isn't useful for others trying to solve this issue, especially those users on nginx servers or on shared hosting without .htaccess access.
You should try to fix this in PHP using an action.
Looking at your question, I can tell that theme you have is checking for GET data in the URL bar, which is the ?key1=value1&key2=value2 part of an URL. GET is an HTTP method that you can read about here if you want to learn more.
You can actually set GET data in PHP, and you can safely put this into your functions.php file.
You will want to create a function that simply checks the current page, and if it's a product category page sets the GET data.
At the bottom of your functions.php, you'd want to add something like this:
<?php
//Force all category pages to list view.
add_action('woocommerce_before_main_content','force_category_list_view', 5);
function force_category_list_view(){
if(is_product_category()){
$_GET['product_view'] = 'list';
}
};
?>
I actually can't test this, but I think it'd work. Essentially, in the woocommerce template archive-product.php, the first action that runs is 'woocommerce_before_main_content'. What we're doing is calling our function, which checks the page is indeed a product category. If it is, it sets the GET variable as list, which is exactly what the URL is telling the page to do already.
Mainly this is just a better practise than altering your .htaccess, but someone determined could also override that GET data by changing the URL to read ?product_view=list&product_view=xyz I can't imagine this would be an issue in this instance, but in other instances it might be.