.htaccess redirects from html to wordpress

Question

I have moved a site from htm to Wordpress. I'm having issues with the redirects. They resolve to the 'old url' and a 404 inside the 'post' area. I have tried rewrite and redirect with no difference in results - Code shows both variations tried

    # BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
# Redirect 301 rules here
RewriteRule ^/Costa-Rica-Real-Estate\.htm$ http://www.sitename.com/costa-rica-property/ [L,R=301,NC] 
RewriteRule ^/costa-rica-videos\.htm$ http://sitename.com/costa-rica-videos/ [L,R=301,NC] 
redirect 301 /image-viewer.htm http://sitename.com/san-ramon-costa-rica-property-gallery/
redirect 301 /about.htm http://sitename.com/about/
#End redirect rules
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

Answer 1

You need to remove the leading slashes from the regex of your rules and not use mod_alias (the Redirect directive).

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
# Redirect 301 rules here
RewriteRule ^Costa-Rica-Real-Estate\.htm$ http://www.sitename.com/costa-rica-property/ [L,R=301,NC] 
RewriteRule ^costa-rica-videos\.htm$ http://sitename.com/costa-rica-videos/ [L,R=301,NC] 
RewriteRule ^image-viewer\.htm$ http://sitename.com/san-ramon-costa-rica-property-gallery/ [L,R=301]
RewriteRule ^about\.htm$ http://sitename.com/about/ [L,R=301]
#End redirect rules
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

The first reason is the leading slash is stripped from the URI before the rules are applied when the rules are in an htaccess file, so your rules would never match. The second reason is that mod_alias and mod_rewrite both get applied to the requests so they'll end up interferring with each other.