Overwrite Wordpress's URL rewrite not working

Question

What I'm trying to do it's pretty much simple, but it's not working and I don't know if it's a Wordpress rewrite or I'm just doing it wrong.

What I have is this url:

http://www.example.com/newsletter/?ut=token

And I want .htaccess to write it as following:

http://www.example.com/newsletter/confirm/token

Same thing for this:

http://www.example.com/newsletter/?uc=token

Which should be rewritten as:

http://www.example.com/newsletter/delete/token

This is my actual .htaccess:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

RewriteRule ^newsletter/confirm/(.+)/?$ index.php?page_id=4058&ut=$1 [L,NC]
RewriteRule ^newsletter/delete/(.+)/?$ index.php?page_id=4058&del=$1 [L,NC]

RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

4058 is the id of newsletter page. I've also tried this:

RewriteRule ^newsletter/confirm/(.+)/?$ newsletter/?ut=$1 [L,NC]
RewriteRule ^newsletter/delete/(.+)/?$ newsletter/?del=$1 [L,NC]

But it still not working at all. With the first method it goes to newsletter page without query string ( so it gives an empty page ); with the second one it gives 404 Not found.

I've also tried using Wordpress's built-in function add_rewrite_rule without success, this is what I've tried:

function customRewriteRules(){
    add_rewrite_rule('^newsletter/confirm/(.+)/?', 'index.php?page_id=4058&ut=$matches[1]', 'top');
    add_rewrite_rule('^newsletter/delete/(.+)/?', 'index.php?page_id=4058&del=$matches[1]', 'top');
}
add_action('init', 'customRewriteRules');

Could it be something related to a kind of rewrite priority for Wordpress's base rewrite conditions? Or am I just doing it bad?

Answer 1

WordPress has its own rewriting system in PHP so you can do it both ways

If you want to rewrite these url from htaccess, i would only make it rewrite

http://www.example.com/newsletter/confirm/token to http://www.example.com/newsletter/?ut=token

instead of trying to rewrite http://www.example.com/newsletter/confirm/token to http://www.example.com/index.php?page_id=4058&ut=token

And let WordPress handle the page id rewrite.

So the htaccess rule would be:

RewriteRule ^newsletter/confirm/(.+)/?$ /newsletter/?ut=$1 [L,NC]

Alternatively you can define your rewrite rule in the WordPress rewrite system:

add_rewrite_rule('^newsletter/confirm/(.+)/?$', 'index.php?page_id=4058&ut=$matches[1]', 'top');

Anyway, to access this new query variable you have to declare it in WordPress aswell:

add_filter('query_vars','my_add_ut_query_var');

function my_add_ut_query_var($vars) {
    array_push($vars, 'designer');
    return $vars;
}

Now you can access it from your page template:

$token = get_query_var('ut')

And don"t forget to flush your rules when you add a new one of course :)

(Also be careful you have a typo with your uc or ut parameter)