General Support: Cruft-Free URLs / Mod_rewrite problem

Hello.

First of all, thank you for this great application: I have been hunting for something like this for a long time and could not find anything suitable until the Plogger. Great job!

Now, I have a slight problem with "Cruft-Free" URLs and Mod_rewrite while using Plogger installation for my gallery http://www.informity.com/gallery/. I checked the corresponding option in Plogger's "Option", and I can see .htaccess file being altered. I also made sure that Mod_rewrite is available. This "Cruft-Free URLs" mechanism seems to work fine on the first Collection but does not the second (click on "Graphics" Collections, you will get "Forbidden. You don't have permission to access /gallery/graphics/ on this server." error message).

I am stuck at this point because I do not see how those Collections are different. Here are the things I have tried:

1. Using the following directives for /gallery in httpd.conf

<Directory /path/to/my/gallery>
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>

and then, in .htaccess (I did not alter what Plogger has generated):

# BEGIN Plogger

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /gallery
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f
RewriteRule ^.*$ - [S=2]
RewriteRule feed/$ plog-rss.php?path=%{REQUEST_URI} [L]
RewriteRule ^.*$ index.php?path=%{REQUEST_URI} [L]
</IfModule>
# END Plogger

2. Placing the whole rewrite rule set directly into httpd.conf as follows:

<Directory /http/www/i/informity.com/public_html/gallery>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /gallery
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f
RewriteRule ^.*$ - [S=2]
RewriteRule feed/$ plog-rss.php?path=%{REQUEST_URI} [L]
RewriteRule ^.*$ index.php?path=%{REQUEST_URI} [L]
</Directory>

Please, let me know if I am doing something wrong or how else I can debug it. Your help will be greatly appreciated :)

I think the problem is that /gallery/graphics/ is a real directory (it is where Plogger stores graphical image files for the UI), therefore mod_rewrite is not translating this "Virtual URL" into it's crufty counterpart, but instead trying to list a virtual directory of the graphics folder. Most servers prohibit virtual directory listings by default, hence the forbidden access message.

If you rename the collection to something else, I suspect your problem will dissapear. Alternatively, if the name "graphics" is absolutely vital, you could change the name of the actual "graphics" directory in the Plogger base install to something else, but you will then have the onus of changing all the paths within the Plogger PHP files to match the new path to the UI graphics.

Make sense?

While we are on this subject, I have a suggestion: if you would prefix all plogger-related system files and directories, including gallery.php, with plogger- (just as you did for plogger-functions.php), the chance of running on to the problem like mine would be close to 0. In addition, the whole application source code will be easily recognizable and look consistent.

:)