Prevent bypass of htaccess

[Tim_Christopher]

My Problem
I am using htaccess to apply a header and footer to every php page, and if a user follows a happy path and loads pages in the form http://www.example.com/about.php then all works fine.

The problem comes when a user visits the site using a url like: http://www.example.com/about/php

For some reason the php page (about.php) still loads but without the header and footer being applied. This is not what I want.

The .htaccess file is as follows:
[INDENT]AddType application/x-httpd-php .html .php .htm
php_value auto_prepend_file "/home/..../header.php"
php_value auto_append_file "/home/..../footer.php"[/INDENT]

Can anyone can explain what is going on and how I can overcome this issue?

Cheers!

[MarkR]

I can't explain what's going on. There's no reason that /about/php should load about.php, in fact, it should not, under any normal circumstances.

Please check the entire configuration of your (I assume Apache) server, and paste the relevant parts, especially if it uses mod_rewrite.

Normally if .htaccess is enabled in a given directory it will automatically apply to all subdirectories. The only case where this will not hold will be if either it's been overridden by some other config, or if content is not in fact being served out of that directory at all (or for instance, by a different handler etc).

Mark