Add URL Rewrite Rule To Wordpress - wordpress

Question

I've written a Wordpress plugin that adds a query string to the URL. However I can't seem to modify the htaccess to rewrite this. Not sure if Wordpress is overriding it?
The current htaccess is:
# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress
And the URL I'm trying to rewrite is:
http://domain.com/deal-info/?id=87&post_name=testdealtitle
Desired URL:
http://domain.com/deal-info/87/testdealtitle
I've tried adding:
RewriteRule ^([^/]*)/([^/]*)$ /deal-info/?id=$1&post_name=$2 [L]
to no avail. Any ideas appreciated!

Answer 1

When you do this:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
This means: "if it's not a file, and if it's not a dir, redirect all incoming URLs to
index.php.
Your rewriterule should work... unless you've put it after the previous rewriterule. So, in short, are you sure your .htaccess it like that:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^([^/]*)/([^/]*)$ /deal-info/?id=$1&post_name=$2 [L]
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
Please tell me if it works.
Moreover if you only want to redirect only deal-info, you should do something like (not tested):
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^(/)?deal-info/([^/]*)/([^/]*)$ /deal-info/?id=$2&post_name=$3 [L]
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
Two hints:
Please try to use the RewriteLog directive: it helps you to track down such problems:
# Trace:
# (!) file gets big quickly, remove in prod environments:
RewriteLog "/web/logs/mywebsite.rewrite.log"
RewriteLogLevel 9
RewriteEngine On
My favorite tool to check for regexp:
http://www.quanetic.com/Regex (don't forget to choose ereg(POSIX) instead of preg(PCRE)!)
May I ask you to add the rewritelog in your question?

Answer 2

After much confusion I found an answer here:
https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/5413/need-help-with-add-rewrite-rule
Though I think the proper way to do it is by:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Rewrite_API/add_rewrite_rule
I'm not sure if you can do this directly in htaccess, or I was having a conflict problem with another plugin I was using.
Thanks again to Olivier for his extensive answer!