RewriteRule (to remove .php) and old redirect 301 not working?

Question

I'm not experienced in editing .htaccess

I wanted to

1. redirect non-www to www.

2. remove .php extension

3. set up a custom 404 page

I managed to do this (looking for solution in the web and on serverfault.com), but now it seems that my old redirect 301 with .php extension are not working anymore:

redirect 301 /download.php /features.php

how I could solve it? Thank you!

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

Options +FollowSymlinks -MultiViews
RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET\s.+\.php [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.+)\.php$ /$1 [NE,R=301,L,NC]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !\.php$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.php -f
RewriteRule . %{REQUEST_URI}.php [L]

Options +FollowSymlinks
ErrorDocument 404 /404
RewriteEngine on 

Answer 1

You need to add the PT flag to your RewriteRule:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !\.php$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.php -f
RewriteRule . %{REQUEST_URI}.php [PT]

The reason is that the substitution in a RewriteRule is normally assumed to be a file path, not a uri, and thus directives like Redirect etc. are not applied. The PTflag (pass through) tells apache to consider the rewrite rules as an uri, and keep applying uri mapping rules.