Permalinks not working but mod_rewrite & htaccess IS working

I have a Zend Framework site in this dir /var/www/example.com/ and put the WP blog in this dir /var/www/example.com/public/blog/

The following are the important files…

/var/www/example.com/public/.htaccess contains:

RewriteEngine on
    RewriteBase /
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -s [OR]
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -l [OR]
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
    RewriteRule ^.*$ - [NC,L]
    RewriteRule ^blog - [NC,L] #Just added this line, it was previous not there
    RewriteRule ^.*$ index.php [NC,L]

Then my .htaccess in the /blog/ folder is this:

# BEGIN WordPress
    <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteBase /blog/
    RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
    RewriteRule . /blog/index.php [L]
    </IfModule>
    # END WordPress

Clicking around the zend site works fine & the rewrite removing index.php from the URL is perfect. Going into the /blog/ subfolder loads the WP blog just fine. But when I click on any post in the blog, it gets redirected to the ZF app, and doesn’t stay within wordpress.

The end result I am chasing is to keep the two separate, yet make sure both of them rewrite the index.php so it isn’t rendered in the URL.

I don’t have good experience with htaccess so I am not sure what’s happening. Here is my VHost just for good measure.

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerAdmin webmaster@dummy-host2.example.com
    DocumentRoot "/var/www/example.com/public"
    ServerName example.com
    ErrorLog "logs/example.local-error.log"
    CustomLog "logs/example.local-access.log" common

    <Directory "/var/www/example.com/public" >
             Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
             AllowOverride All
             Order allow,deny
             allow from all

    </Directory>

    <Location />
            RewriteEngine on
            RewriteBase /
            RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
            RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
            RewriteRule !\.(js|ico|gif|jpg|png|css)$ /index.php
    </Location>

    SetEnv APPLICATION_ENV development

    </VirtualHost>

NOTE I removed the .htaccess in the /public/ folder for testing because of the Rewrite rule in the VHost, but my problem remains.

The request & response URLs are the same as they are shown in the browser:

http://example.local/blog/my-test-blog-post/

HOWEVER, the browser renders an error from ZF, indicating it was directed to the public/index.php file instead of the intended public/blog/index.php file. I also used Netbeans & XDebug to step through the code. I put a breakpoint on the first line of both index.php files, and when clicking a blog post link, it immediately loads the ZF index.php, not the /blog/index.php

It appears if I use a URL like http://example.local/blog/?p=695 it works and is not routed to the ZF app. but when I use custom permalinks in wp-admin like http://example.local/blog/my-test-blog-post/ it tries to route to ZF.

Options FollowSymLinks & AllowOverride All are both set and verify this because the URL rewrite is successful throughout the ZF app. I just can’t get it right…

As a final note, this permalink works on WP:

/index.php/%post_id%/%postname%/

But I want to use this without the index file:
/%post_id%/%postname%/