I am not a PHP developer at heart and I have been asked to perform some SEO on an existing PHP website.
The first thing I noticed was the ugly URLs so I want to get these to rewrite to something more informative. Here are all the possible patterns:
/index.php?m=ModuleType&categoryID=id
/index.php?m=ModuleType&categoryID=id&productID=id
/index.php?page=PageType
/index.php?page=PageType&detail=yes
So basically what I want to do is convert these into something like:
/ModuleType/Category
/ModuleType/Category/ProductName
/Page
/Page
I haven't used mod_rewrite before any advice or examples would be great!
Thanks.
mod_rewrite would rather be used to do the opposite: rewrite requests of /ModuleType/Category/ProductName
internally to /index.php?m=ModuleType&categoryID=id&productID=id
. Using the new URLs in the documents is the job of your application.
Edit Here’s an example of how a function might look like that turns your parameterized URLs into the new ones:
function url($url, $rules) {
$url = parse_url($url);
parse_str($url['query'], $url['query']);
$argNames = array_keys($url['query']);
foreach ($rules as $rule) {
if ($rule[0] == $url['path'] && array_keys($rule[1]) == $argNames) {
$newUrl = $rule[2];
foreach ($rule[1] as $name => $pattern) {
if (!preg_match('/'.addcslashes($pattern, '/').'/', $url['query'][$name], $match)) {
continue 2;
}
$newUrl = str_replace('<'.$name.'>', $match[0], $newUrl);
}
return $newUrl;
}
}
return $url;
}
$rules = array(
array(
'/index.php',
array('m'=>'.*', 'categoryID'=>'.*', 'productID'=>'.*'),
'/<m>/<categoryID>/<productID>'
)
);
echo '<a href="' . url('/index.php?m=ModuleType&categoryID=categoryID&productID=productID', $rules) . '">/ModuleType/Category/ProductName</a>';
I'm not a mod_rewrite expert by any means, but this is an example of how I put together the .htaccess for the Image Flair site:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(.*)/(.*)\.png$ imageFlair.php?mode=$1&userid=$2 [L]
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.png$ imageFlair.php?userid=$1 [L]
</IfModule>
This basically maps:
MODE/USERID.png ->
imageFlair.php?mode=MODE&userid=USERID
and
USERID.png ->
imageFlair.php?userid=USERID
You should be able to adapt that to your needs, but you may have a couple of issues:
- If you want to use "names" rather than IDs on your URL you will need to alter the PHP to accept the names.
- You might have an issue with /Page and /ModuleType conflicting, if you wanted to also include more parameters in with Page, unless you can put together a regex that can determine which is which.
Going on the list of URLs you want, this should work, although I won't claim it's the best or only way to do it :-)
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(.*)/(.*)/(.*)$ index.php?m=$1&categoryID=$2&productID=$3 [L]
RewriteRule ^(.*)/(.*)$ index.php?m=$1&categoryID=$2 [L]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?Page=$1 [L]
</IfModule>
As suggested, you may want to replace the .* with [^/]+ but I had issues with non-matches when I did that, and had no time to troubleshoot, so YMMV :-)
It's not quite clear from your post what the variables are. But assuming that ModuleType
, id
(x2) and Page
are all variables then the following rules with backreferences should work within a .htaccess
file.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/([^/]+)$ /index.php?m=$1&categoryID=$2 [L]
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)$ /index.php?m=$1&categoryID=$2&productID=$3 [L]
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)$ /index.php?page=PageType [L]
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/detail$ /index.php?page=PageType&detail=yes [L]
The last one didn't really make sense as you've written it. So instead you can add /detail
on the end.
These should slip straight over the top of your existing applications without any modifications to the app. Because they aren't redirecting with [R]
it will be transparent to your users.