Q:

.htaccess simple URL rewrite

Below is the .htaccess that I have (updated):
Options -Multiviews
Options +FollowSymLinks  
RewriteEngine On  

RewriteBase / #saw this on many examples online, not sure exactly what purpose it serves

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d  
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f  

RewriteRule ^/(.*)/(\w+.php)$ news.php?post=$2&amp;cat=$1 

Basically, I want URL's that look like:

phovze.com/WineGlass/Vin.php 
phovze.com/Chandelier/Auto.php

To be translated to:

phovze.com/news.php?post=Vin.php&cat=WineGlass
phovze.com/news.php?post=Auto.php&cat=Chandelier

There is php code to prevent the wrong pages from loading so hopefully using the '*' won't be so risky.
Any idea why this isn't working?
Edit:
I changed the line as recommended below to:
RewriteRule ^(.*)/(.*)$ ./news.php?cat=$1&amp;post=$2

This returned a 500 error however, the same post prompted me to add a / because "It starts parsing after the .com" (roughly quoted). This got rid of the 500 error but the site returns 404 still:
RewriteRule ^/(.*)/(.*)$ ./news.php?cat=$1&amp;post=$2

edit 2:
The exact error:
The requested URL /poz/WineGlass/Vin was not found on this server.
Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
I tried the following as well:
RewriteRule ^./poz/(.*)/(.*)$ ./news.php?post=$2&amp;cat=$1

poz is the root folder for phovze.com
edit 3:
Through persistent web research it appears GoDaddy.com servers require -Multiviews however, even with this disabled, the issue persists.
Edit 4:
Used RegExr to verify the regular expression

http://regexr.com?37s4v Updated

It looks as though the server is not seeing that the URL needs to be rewritten and is simply trying to access a file that isn't there. Maybe my expression is incorrect?
Edit 5:
After doing many tests it looks like the server is not identifying that the requested URL needs to be re-written. I have changed the RewriteCond several times to get it to work following the information here: 

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_rewrite.html

However, I have failed to get it to work.
The error that shows the folder /poz/ seems to show up for every 404 so I no longer believe this is the issue. I'm now thinking the issue is that the URL is either not tripping the conditions to be considered for rewriting or the pattern in the expression does not match the URL.

A:

Try this:
RewriteRule ^(.*)/(.*)$ ./news.php?post=$2.php&cat=$1
I believe having the phovze.com part in the rewrite rule is a problem, because the first parameter of the RewriteRule only starts matching after the .com/

