title: CodeIgniter htaccess and URL rewrite issues
body: <p>I have never used CodeIgniter before, let alone ANY php framework and I thought I would give it a try. Everything is going fine except I cannot seem to remove the index.php from the URL and still access my pages. </p>
  
  <p>I have never used the MVC structure so I am learning as I go, so forgive me if I'm doing this wrong.</p>
  
  <p>I am trying to access a view I created called 'about_page.php' by simply typing in <strong>localhost/ci/about</strong> but currently I can only access it by using <strong>localhost/ci/index.php/about</strong></p>
  
  <p>The controller for the page is: <strong>/application/controllers/about.php</strong> <br />
  The Model for the page is: <strong>/application/models/about_model.php</strong> <br />
  And the View for the page is: <strong>/application/views/about_page.php</strong></p>
  
  <p>I have searched for a solution to this issue, but haven't been able to find one. Here is where I have already searched:</p>
  
  <p><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5203581/codeigniter-removing-index-php?rq=1">CodeIgniter - removing index.php</a><br />
  <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11947234/codeigniter-how-to-remove-the-index-php-from-url">Codeigniter - how to remove the index.php from url?</a><br />
  <a href="http://www.farinspace.com/codeigniter-htaccess-file/" rel="noreferrer">http://www.farinspace.com/codeigniter-htaccess-file/</a></p>
  
  <p>CodeIgniter comes with a .htaccess file in the 'application' folder which contains only <code>Allow Deny From All</code>. So I created a new .htaccess file in the root directory, <code>http://localhost/ci/.htaccess</code> and added this code to it:</p>
  
  <pre><code>RewriteEngine On
  RewriteBase /ci
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php/$1 [L]
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>When the .htaccess file is in the root directory I get a 500 Internal Server Error. When I copy the exact same file into the applications folder the 500 error goes away, but I still cannot access the about page by using <strong>localhost/ci/about</strong></p>
  
  <p>I have already changed <code>$config['index_page'] = 'index.php';</code> to <code>$config['index_page'] = '';</code> AND I tried changing <code>$config['uri_protocol']    = 'AUTO';</code> to <code>$config['uri_protocol']  = 'REQUEST_URI';</code> but I am still getting the Internal Server Error.</p>
  
  <p>I went into the httpd.conf file and uncommented the mod_rewrite.so module so I know mod_rewrite is active.</p>
  
  <p>Does anyone have any ideas why this isn't working or how I can get this work? I know there are alot of questions on StackOverflow on this subject but I couldn't find one that answered my question. </p>
  
  <p>Am I doing this right? Should I even be able to access the about page by visiting <strong>localhost/ci/about</strong> or do I have to create an 'about' directory in the 'application' directory?</p>