Search engine friendly URLs

[Geoff Berrow]

I've been trying to use .htaccess to get Apache to recognise 'article'
as 'article.php' so I can have search engine friendly urls in the form
article/var1/var2/var3 etc

I have this in a .htaccess file

<Files article>
ForceType application/x-httpd-php
</Files>

This works fine on my test server but for some reason my host server
(choice is out of my control) will not allow me to upload a .htaccess
file.

Is there another way of doing it?
--
Geoff Berrow (put thecat out to email)
It's only Usenet, no one dies.
My opinions, not the committee's, mine.
Simple RFDs http://www.ckdog.co.uk/rfdmaker/

[Geoff Berrow]

Message-ID: <r4********************************@4ax.comfrom Geoff
Berrow contained the following:

>I've been trying to use .htaccess to get Apache to recognise 'article'
as 'article.php' so I can have search engine friendly urls in the form
article/var1/var2/var3 etc

I have this in a .htaccess file

<Files article>
ForceType application/x-httpd-php
</Files>

This works fine on my test server but for some reason my host server
(choice is out of my control) will not allow me to upload a .htaccess
file.

The file was uploaded, it was just hidden. Unfortunately it still does
not work. mod_mime is loaded so I'm now at a loss to know what to do
next.

--
Geoff Berrow (put thecat out to email)
It's only Usenet, no one dies.
My opinions, not the committee's, mine.
Simple RFDs http://www.ckdog.co.uk/rfdmaker/

[BRADINO]

Hey Geoff,

One if the cleanest ways to setup a site is to use mod_rewrite in
Apache. I am going to show you a simple way to do this using an
htaccess file and a little PHP. First step is to make an htaccess file
with the following code:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?loc=$1

Now everything that is not a folder or a file will get passed to the
index.php file as $_GET['loc']. You could change the index.php to any
file you like and the ?loc= to some other variable if you like.

Next you need to groom the url. Do not leave out this step. You are
injecting the url into your script... I suggest something solid like
the following:

<?php
$url = preg_replace('/[^[:alnum:]\-\/]/', '', $_GET['loc']);
?>

So now you have the url into your script safely so you need to break it
apart. You are basically going to pass variables here. All you have to
do is explode on the forward slash. You can do it simply like this:

<?php
$parts = explode('/',$url);
$section = $parts[0];
$subsection = $parts[1];
?>
Hope this helps!

http://www.bradino.com/apache/mod-rewrite/

BRAD

[jopperdepopper]

You may want to check out this article as well:

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/succeed/

good luck!

[Geoff Berrow]

Message-ID: <11**********************@h54g2000cwb.googlegroups .comfrom
jopperdepopper contained the following:

>You may want to check out this article as well:

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/succeed/

good luck!

Thanks for that. I've now managed to get the first method I posted to
work (It didn't due to my stupidity in reading the instructions...) It
feels like an instinctively better way of doing it. Instead of passing
everything that is not a file to a script (or in your example passing
everything to a script) the ForceType method is specifically targeted.

The method is this: a php file is saved /without an extension/. Let's
say the file is called articles. The following is placed in .htaccess

<Files article>
ForceType application/x-httpd-php
</Files>

This causes Apache to treat our extensionless file as a php file. The
URL produced just looks like a series of directories e.g.
/article/news/local

Obviously the directories do not exist.
Apache has the feature of looking back up the URL till it comes to
something it recognises - in this case our file article. article
contains code to extract the variables from $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']

http://www.ckdog.co.uk/article/news/local
--
Geoff Berrow (put thecat out to email)
It's only Usenet, no one dies.
My opinions, not the committee's, mine.
Simple RFDs http://www.ckdog.co.uk/rfdmaker/