Search engine listing

[Nel]

I am working on a new web site and wanted a second opinion on an idea:

Most pages will be created dynamically from text and headers in MySQL. Each
page has a pageid such as 'home' or 'aboutus'.

Rather than having the page index.php?content=aboutus as the site links I
was thinking about creating a php file automatically whenever a new page is
added. For example where the pageid = aboutus, I would create aboutus.php
The script would be the same for all MySQL pages and take the filename (less
the .php) and call the page from the database.

Hopefully this will allow all the search engines (not just Google) to list
all the pages.

Does anyone have any other/better ideas or comments?

Nel

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[Nel]

OMG
"Andy Hassall" <an**@andyh.co.uk> wrote in message
news:6b********************************@4ax.com...

On Tue, 22 Jul 2003 22:58:11 +0100, "Nel" <ne***@ne14.co.NOSPAMuk> wrote:

I am working on a new web site and wanted a second opinion on an idea:

Most pages will be created dynamically from text and headers in MySQL. Eachpage has a pageid such as 'home' or 'aboutus'.

Rather than having the page index.php?content=aboutus as the site links I
was thinking about creating a php file automatically whenever a new page isadded. For example where the pageid = aboutus, I would create aboutus.php
The script would be the same for all MySQL pages and take the filename (lessthe .php) and call the page from the database.

Hopefully this will allow all the search engines (not just Google) to listall the pages.

Does anyone have any other/better ideas or comments?
Rather than use PHP to output other PHP pages, I would strongly recommend

the use of Apache's mod_rewrite to present pages that look static to search
engines, but are in fact calls to a single PHP page with appropriate
parameters.

i.e. You can use this module so that:

/whatever/index.php

... transparently presents the output of

/aboutus.php?site=whatever

... or from wherever your content is generated; mod_rewrite is exceedingly (perhaps excessively!) flexible.

When you start generating code-from-code you run into _very_ awkward debugging problems; is your generatING code causing the problem, or your generatED code causing the problem?

[If you're not running Apache... then I'd strongly recommend you start ;-) ]
Relevant manual pages:

http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/mod/mod_rewrite.html
http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/misc/rewriteguide.html

--
Andy Hassall (an**@andyh.co.uk) icq(5747695) (http://www.andyh.co.uk)
Space: disk usage analysis tool (http://www.andyhsoftware.co.uk/space)

Hi Andy,

The documentation seems way over the top for what I need. Do you know
enough about mod_rewrite to show me one practical example for turning

www.example.com/aboutus/index.php in to
www.example.com/index.php?contents=aboutus
???

I know that I need to RTFM but a practial example will really help me
understand the bits I need to know. I can then expand from there.

Many thanks in advance

Nel

[Ian.H [dS]]

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Hash: SHA1

Whilst lounging around on Wed, 23 Jul 2003 00:50:40 +0100, "Nel"
<ne***@ne14.co.NOSPAMuk> amazingly managed to produce the following
with their Etch-A-Sketch:

The documentation seems way over the top for what I need. Do you
know enough about mod_rewrite to show me one practical example for
turning

www.example.com/aboutus/index.php in to
www.example.com/index.php?contents=aboutus
???

I know that I need to RTFM but a practial example will really help
me understand the bits I need to know. I can then expand from
there.

Many thanks in advance

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/(.*)/index.php$ /index.php?contents=$1 [L]
That should do the job =)

The (.*) grabs any chars within the first and second /. It stores the
grabbed chars in $1. The [L] specifies the last rule if that match is
achieved (ie: if you have more rules afterwards, these may well be
irrelevant, thus we want to "break out of the rule list now").

The ^ char specifies the beginning anchor tag, and the $ the last
anchor tag.

For more information on these chars, google for "Perl regex" or
"regex" (REGular EXpressions).. these will help explain further chars
you could use in the future possibly too.
HTH.

Regards,

Ian

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