WordPress multisite .htaccess causes 500 error on old *.php URLs

Try something like the following at the top of your .htaccess file:

Options -MultiViews

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule (.+)\.php$ /$1 [R=302,L]

The above redirects any URL that ends in .php that does not map to a physical file and removes the .php extension in the redirection.

Although these requests (with a .php extension) shouldn’t be triggering a 500 error in the first place? If the above redirect resolves this, then it would seem to imply that it is WordPress itself that is triggering the 500 error?

---

I used this code to remove the .php extension

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ / [L,QSA]
</IfModule>

This resolved the 500 error …

This code is more likely to cause a 500 error than fix it? This doesn’t “remove the .php extension” – it simply routes all URLs to the document root, which triggers mod_dir to route the request to index.php.