.htaccess rewriterule syntax on ipage - regex

Question

My mates and I are putting the finishing touches on our website hosted with ipage but we are just having one small issue with our .htaccess.
We want to make our urls SEO friendly (and neat) and the rewriterule is not working, we keep getting 404 errors. I just want to verify the syntax is correct. I have questioned it with ipage and they said mod_rewrite is installed and allowoverride all is set but couldn't help with the regular expression.
The url is:
http:// www.example.com/article.php?title=Some-Article
and we want to make it:
http:// www.example.com/Some-Article
the entire htaccess file:
# Protect db_connect
<files db_connect.php>
order allow,deny
deny from all
</files>
# Protect .htaccess
<files .htaccess>
order allow,deny
deny from all
</files>
Options +FollowSymLinks
Options +Indexes
RewriteEngine On
# Remove .php but still allow addressing .php
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}\.php -f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.php
RewriteRule ^([^/]*)/$ /article.php?title=$1 [L]
Any help would be greatly appreciated as I have searched for hours and also tested the syntax generated from http://www.generateit.net/mod-rewrite/ with no luck.
Regards,
Adam

Answer 1

Thanks guys,
My mates and I did end up sorting it, we changed around a few things on the back-end to make the url change from:
http:// www.example.com/article.php?title=Some-Article
to:
http:// www.example.com/article.php?article=Some-Article
then with the following adjustments to the .htaccess file we got it working:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule page/([^/]*)/$ /index.php?p=$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^product/([^/]*)$ /article.php?article=$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^([^/]*)/$ /index.php?sort=$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^([^/]*)/page/([^/]*)$ /?sort=$1&p=$2 [L]
so we now have the following urls being formed:
http:// www.example.com/page/2
http:// www.example.com/product/Some-Product/
http:// www.example.com/
http:// www.example.com/category/page/2
The debugging really did help, appreciate it, I turned up the error reporting level in php.ini and made it output to a file which I could access through FTP.