What's wrong with this htaccess redirect?

Question

I recently turned an old Joomla site into a Wordpress site and I want to redirect the old urls to the correct new ones. For starters I tried to redirect them all to the homepage but even that didnt work.

All the old urls look like website.com/?q=node/1 (or sometimes ?q=user/ etc), so I figured this would be enough:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^q=(.*)
RewriteRule . /home/ [R=301]

Why doesn't this work?

Answer 1

[EDIT - FINAL SOLUTION - see comments]

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} q=
RewriteRule (.*) lexlijst.nl/$1? [L,R=301]

Answer 2

Have you enabled the rewrite engine? You need to enable it in httpd.conf AND in all virtual hosts, since directives are not inherited. Reference: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/mod/mod_rewrite.html#RewriteEngine

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^q=(.*)

RewriteRule . /home/ [R=301]

Answer 3

You can debug this sort of thing by adding a RewriteLog line. I suspect your RewriteRule line is the culprit though. It should be something like:

 RewriteRule .* /home/ [R=301]