I am on a shared server that has PHP installed as CGI (in SuExec mode) and trying to implement image authorization (using cgi_img_auth.php because PATH_INFO indeed does not work on this server) as discussed at:

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Image_Authorisation#Apache_Instructions...

The htaccess rewrites for cgi_img_auth.php are in conflict with short URL rewrites (I use exactly that same setup as Wikipedia). Here is the code for short URL's (unmodified from MW example and working just fine on my site)

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule ^wiki/(.*)$ w/index.php?title=$1 [PT,L,QSA] RewriteRule ^wiki/*$ wiki/ [L,QSA] RewriteRule ^/*$ wiki/ [L,QSA]

Here is the code for cgi_img_auth.php rewrites from the above link (using the standard images directory, which for short URL's is typically w/images not wiki/images): Before you ask, I was trying the standard w/images directory location to isolate the problem, which turned out to be this htaccess conflict. Eventually, I want to move the images directory out of public_html, which is the whole point of using image authorization.

RewriteRule ^/w/images(.*)$ /w/cgi_img_auth.php/$1 [R] RewriteRule ^w/cgi_img_auth.php/(.*)$ w/cgi_img_auth.php?path=/$1

I can't help thinking someone else must have resolved this conflict. I just don't know this syntax at all. No Unix background, I'm embarrassed to say. If someone could help me make these two chucks of htaccess code cooperate, I would be very grateful.