I'm trying to set up our MediaWiki site to use clean URLs and have run into a snag. My pages take a long time to load and kick out a couple of error messages that say "too many HTTP redirects" for the following URLs:

http://www.sourcewatch.org/-?action=raw&ctype=text%2Fcss&smaxage=180...

http://www.sourcewatch.org/-?action=raw&ctype=text%2Fjavascript&smax...

It appears that these URLs are being generated somehow by the lines in xhtml_slim.pt which read as follows:

<script type="text/javascript" tal:attributes="src jsvarurl"></script> and:

<style tal:condition="usercss" type="text/css">/*<![CDATA[*/ ${usercss} /*]]>*/</style> <script tal:condition="userjs" type="text/javascript" tal:attributes="src userjs"></script><script tal:condition="userjsprev" type="text/javascript">/*<![CDATA[*/${userjsprev}/*]]>*/</script> When I delete these lines, the error messages stop.

I've reviewed the MediaWiki page on rewrite rules and am wondering if my problem has to do with the ampescape patch that it says is needed for Apache. I haven't tried installing the patch and don't know if I'll be able to. (The patch says it's for Apache 1.3.26, whereas I have 1.3.29. Also, I don't know if my web host will agree to install the patch.)

I'm guessing that if I can't patch Apache, I can get away with deleting the lines above from xhtml_slim.pt, and everything will work except that (1) users won't be able to customize their javascript and css, and (2) ampersands won't work in page titles. Is this correct?

The current rewrite rules in my .htaccess file are as follows:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/(stylesheets|images)/ RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/(redirect|texvc|index).php RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/error/(40(1|3|4)|500).html RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/favicon.ico RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/robots.txt

# Rewrite http://www.sourcewatch.org/article properly RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php?title=$1 [L,QSA]

Can someone tell me what I need to do?

Regards, Sheldon Rampton