Running WordPress and Drupal on Same Server – This works!

I spent the better part of a day figuring this out and couldn’t track down the exact answer anywhere, so I thought I would pay it forward and share the fix.

I have Drupal installed in the root and WordPress installed in a directory in the root /wp4.

Based on some discussions about the problem, I made the following changes to the .htaccess files:

To the root .htaccess file, I added the following to the rewrite rules:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^wp4

so now that block looks like:

# Rewrite URLs of the form 'x' to the form 'index.php?q=x'.
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^wp4
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !=/favicon.ico
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?q=$1 [L,QSA]

This tells Drupal to rewrite any URI if it is not(!) beginning with(^) wp4.

In the wp4 directory, based on some code that I found, I originally put:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /wp4/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /wp/index.php [L,QSA]
</IfModule>

This only worked half way. If I tried to load domain.com/wp4, it worked fine or domain.com/wp4/?search-listings=true it worked as well. However if I tried to load domain.com/wp4/search-for-homes/ Drupal would field the call and would give me a Drupal 404 page.

I also have Zenphoto running on a directory on the site and it has always worked fine for me, so I tried putting its htaccess instructions in the wp4 htaccess file. This is the new wp4 htaccess:

<IfModule mod_autoindex.c>
	IndexIgnore *
</IfModule>
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
  RewriteEngine On

  RewriteBase /wp4

  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
  RewriteRule ^.*$ - [L]

  RewriteRule ^.*/?$                        index.php [L,QSA]

</IfModule>

Notice it is similar, but slightly different from the original wp4 htaccess file and it works for all instances.

Hope this saves some others the time and trouble I had to go through to figure this out.