How it works

Should you have 1 minute to dig a little bit into a short explanation, this is the right place.

Line 1 and 4 : Tells Apache to execute the block only if the mod_rewrite module is present.

: Tells Apache to execute the block only if the module is present. Line 2 : Tells Apache to activate the Rewrite Engine. This engine can rewrite URLs on the go.

: Tells Apache to activate the Rewrite Engine. This engine can rewrite URLs on the go. Line 3 : We define a rule following this common syntax :

RewriteRule patternToMatchAgainst whereToRedirect [Options]

^(author|tag|category)\/.+$ : This is the pattern to match against.

If you’re not familiar with regular expressions, take a look to this article

This pattern means : If the request looks like /author/anything or /tag/anything or /category/anything then, redirect somewhere.