littled.net

One of the useful things about getting my Plone hosting sorted is that I’ve been forced to dabble in some of the dark arts of systems administration. I now know a little more about such things as mod_rewrite and mod_proxy in Apache. I was attempting to seemingly integrate my Plone site with my existing PHP-based site, doing something like this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

RewriteRule ^/plone($|/.*)
http://myplonesite:9080/VirtualHostBase/http/www.littled.net:80/VirtualHostRoot/_vh_plone$1
[L,P]

So littled.net/plone would lead you straight into the Plone site. When I finally got the .htaccess file syntax correct which took a few passes (like getting the RewriteBase set properly) it kind of worked, except my hosting company don’t have mod_proxy installed (I guess for security reasons which is reasonable).  When the flags were taken out, the redirect did work, rewriting the URLs on the Plone page, but leaving the hideous Virtual Host Monster URL in the browser location bar. So, what I learned is this:

Even if you are using Rewrite rules and not using mod_proxy directly, you still need mod_proxy enabled for it to work properly.

Never mind, my Plone site is now going to be separate site from this with its own URL.