So I have set up htaccess to pick up filenames e.g. /page.html and create the url /index.php?page_url=page and it works ok for all my pages but sitemap.xml isn't being found.
Instead it loads a plain html page with no content as it's returning index.php?page_url=sitemap instead of just loading the sitemap file which is in the root of the directory called sitemap.xml
Here is my htaccess file
RewriteEngine on
##### Security #####
## Keep people out of .inc files
<files *.inc.php>
order allow,deny
deny from all
</files>
<files *.inc.html>
order allow,deny
deny from all
</files>
<FilesMatch "\.(ico|pdf|flv|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|js|css|swf)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=604800, public"
</FilesMatch>
## Deny index views of directories with no index file ##
Options -Indexes
# Ensure php pages cannot be viewed with the exception of /index.php
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
# ensure all pages end with a slash if there's no .xxx terminator
RewriteRule ^(([a-z0-9\-]+/)*[a-z0-9\-]+)$ /$1/%{QUERY_STRING [NC,R=301,L]
#fetch pages with no suffix and treat them as if they are html pages
RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z0-9|_|\-|\/]+)/$ /index.php?pageUrl=$1/&contentType=html&%{QUERY_STRING} [L]
#fetch pages with a suffix and treat them as if they are the approriate page type
RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z0-9|_|\-|\/]+).([html|rss|xml|php]+)$ /index.php?page_url=$1&contentType=$2&%{QUERY_STRING} [L]
The .htaccess file is in the root alongside sitemap.xml and robots.txt which also has the full url of the sitemap in it so I'm not sure where I've gone wrong here
