Sometimes trying to figure out why the hell scripts arent working after trying to get search engine friendly URL’s working with Apache’s rewrite module can be a huge pain in the arse.
One way you can get a bit more insight into what may be broken is by adding the Apache Rewritelog & Rewriteloglevel directives to your apache configuration file.
In my development server the lines are added near the end of the VirtualHost directive, which looks something like:
LogLevel warn
CustomLog /var/log/apache2/access.log combined
ServerSignature On
RewriteLog /var/log/apache2/rewrite.log
RewriteLogLevel 3
</VirtualHost>
The rewriteloglevel can be any number between 1 & 9, one being the least verbose looging level and nine the most.
**This will not work on servers if you don’t have access to the main apache configution files i.e shared hosting environments.