Rewriting paths

Question

By default, pages on our site look like:

http://www.example.com/items/item-1-name

First, I need them to have ".html' on the end:

http://www.example.com/items/item-1-name.html

Second, I need any reference to ".print.html" (below) to redirect to .html:

http://www.example.com/items/item-1-name.print.html

This seems like an .htaccess thing to me, but a few things prompted me to write this question:

1. I don't want to put these in .htaccess (that belongs to Drupal, correct?)
2. I didn't have any success putting them inside my vhost file (following this post)
3. I'm not sure if there is another recommended way to do this routing in drupal

Update: Here's a bit more info on my specific situation:

• I'm only dealing with a single content type here - all 'items' are nodes of the same type.
• Paths are currently generated via Pathauto
• All 'items' are multi-lingual; pathauto creates urls from the title in each language

Answer 1

Your intuition is correct. It looks like a couple of simple htaccess rewrites:

  RewriteRule ^(.*)\\.print\\.html$ /$1 [NC,L,R=301]
  RewriteRule ^(.*)\\.html$ /$1 [NC,L,R=301]

To address your #1 concern, there's no problem altering .htaccess. It contains a few customizations that were designed to be altered depending on your needs (e.g. prepending "www." to your host name). It's required for some modules like boost.

The only caveat is you have to make sure to copy over customizations when you need to update core. If that's a problem there's the .htaccess module dedicated for keeping track of your custom rules.