Pinnacle Cart's .htaccess file heavily uses mod_rewrite to accomplish search engine friendly urls. You will want to use mod_rewrite redirects rather than the standard mod_alias redirects that most are accustomed to. In Pinnacle Cart versions 3.7.10 and above we have added a new feature to the cart that allows you to customize the .htaccess file using the admin area of the cart (in older versions of the cart the only way to make changes of this nature was to edit the .htaccess file directly, which caused potential issues since Pinnacle Cart rewrites the .htaccess file from time to time based on changes made to settings in the admin area). To get to this new area, follow the steps below:
- Go to Cart Settings -> Global Cart Settings
- Click on Search Engine Settings
- From here you will see a text area labeled "Htaccess Overrides"
In the e-commerce industry, the most common need for 301 redirects is to redirect old product urls to new product urls, which helps preserve SEO when switching shopping cart platforms. The example below shows how to redirect http://example.com/old_file_name_123.php to http://example.com/newcart/newfilename.html:
RewriteRule ^old_file_name_123.php http://example.com/newcart/newfilename.html/ [L,R=301]
A rule similar to the one above can be copied and pasted into the Htaccess Overrides section of the cart admin and will be placed into the proper section of the carts .htaccess file. This override will also be preserved throughout any other setting changes, so essentially this is a plug-and-play feature. Mod_rewrite is extremely powerful, and with the combination of the standard flat url features in the cart and the ability to add in custom overrides there is really no limit to what it can achieve.
**Please be advised that custom code is outside of our scope of support and we strongly suggest doing your own research on mod_rewrite to become more familiar with this technology.**
