Trying to rewrite a URL to an existing URL with htaccess

Question

I have a wordpress site up and it's been up for a while. Recently I was asked to change the URL of one of the pages.

The current URL is:

http://url.com/blog/category/newsroom

They want the URL of that page to be:

http://url.com/news

However, I can't alter that original URL nor any of the other URLs on the site. I was trying to write a rewrite rule in the .htaccess file, but I can't get it to display anything other than a 404 page.

Here's the htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteRule ^news/?$ index.php?category_name=newsroom [L]

RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]

# uploaded files
RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?files/(.+) wp-includes/ms-files.php?file=$2 [L]

# add a trailing slash to /wp-admin
RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?wp-admin$ $1wp-admin/ [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule ^ - [L]
RewriteRule  ^[_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/(wp-(content|admin|includes).*) $1 [L]
RewriteRule  ^[_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/(.*\.php)$ $1 [L]
RewriteRule . index.php [L]

I've tried moving it around in the order of things. I've tried adding the "[PT]" flag instead of the "[L]" flag.

Can anyone help?

Answer 1

I was able to get this to work by doing 3 things differently:

1. I removed the rule from the .htaccess file
2. I added a "add_rewrite_rule" function in the functions.php file
3. Rather than using "category_name" I reverted to using "cat" as the parameter

Here's the code:

function rewrites() {
   add_rewrite_rule('^news?$', 'index.php?cat=6', 'top');
}
add_action('init', 'rewrites');