okay... ready for the solution?
1) the automatic config, was not correct (or good enough?)... so had to do a global override. My support team redid this:
location ~ ^/~(.+?)(/.*?\.php)(/.*)?$ {
alias /var/www/vhosts/domain.com/web_users/$1/$2;
fastcgi_split_path_info ^((?U).+\.php)(/?.+)$;
fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $fastcgi_path_info;
fastcgi_pass "unix:///var/www/vhosts/system/domain.com/php-fpm.sock";
include /etc/nginx/fastcgi.conf; }
and said:
location blocks used regex matching, so to override that, I used the ^~ operator, which is a non-regex match that will stop regex matches from being processed if the location matches.
2) and the
Apache & nginx Settings was changed to this
location ^~ /resort/ {
try_files $uri $uri/ /resort.php;
}
so #1 is way over my head
but #2 makes since to me
(at least now it does)
so now my URL of domain.com/resort/param1/param2.php works as expected
PS. I did change the /resort file to include the .php to the file name (resort.php). Support said they never seen it work without it or usually have issues if your try without it.
NOTE: my words of advice: test and watch the error logs. I'm glad I picked up on the minor difference in the error. which led me down the right path to the final solution.
THANKS for your help... you helped me get there