Joomla 2.5.x 403 Forbidden

Question

I used ARTIO JoomSEF to make a change to my .htaccess file from the admin dashboard. The changes were a few 301 redirects for some old pages I had.

As soon as I saved the changes I was brought to this page:

Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@xyz.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.
More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

I decided that I would use an FTP client to access my files and check my htaccess file. I noticed that the changes (301 redirects) were applied. So I decided to delete them and was left with what was originally in my htaccess file only to get this message when I tried to access any page of the site:

Forbidden
You don't have permission to access /administrator on this server.

Does anyone know what might be causing this? Or if there is anything I can do to resolve the issue?

Thanks

Answer 1

What I would suggest doing is:

1. Re-download Joomla 2.5.
2. Extract the htaccess.txt file
3. Convert it to .htaccess
4. Upload it to your server, so you have a fresh copy of it

Instead of using 3rd party extensions to perform simple redirects for old pages, I would suggest using Joomla's built in Redirect component which you can find in:

Joomla backend >> Components (top menu) >> Redirect

Here you can enter to old URL to which it will redirect to the desired new URL.