My current code is something like this
store.php?storeid=12&page=3
and I'm looking to translate it to something like this
mysite.com/roberts-clothing-store/store/12/3
and something like this:
profile.php?userid=19
to
mysite.com/robert-ashcroft/user/19
I understand that it's best to have the SEO-friendly text as far left as possible, ie not
mysite.com/user/19/robert-ashcroft
(what stackoverflow does)
I can't figure out how to do this in apache's mod_rewrite. Any help?
Actually, you may have to think "upside-down" with mod_rewrite
.
The easiest way is that to make your PHP emit the rewritten mysite.com/roberts-clothing-store/store/12/3
links.
mod_rewrite
will then proxy the request to one PHP page for rewrite.php?path=roberts-clothing-store/store/12/3
that will decode the URL and sets the arguments (here storeid
and page
)
and dynamically include the correct PHP file, or just emit 301 for renamed pages.
A pure solution with mod_rewrite
is possible, but this one is much easier to get right, especially when you don't master mod_rewrite
.
The main prob could be with the overhead that might be significant but is the price of simplicity & flexibility. mod_rewrite
is much faster
Update :
The other posts do answer the questionn, but they don't solve the typical duplicate-content problem that avoided by having canonical urls (and using 301/404 for all those URLs that seems ok, but aren't).
Try these rules:
RewriteRule ^[^/]+/store/([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)$ store.php?storeid=$1&page=$2
RewriteRule ^[^/]+/user/([0-9]+)/ profile.php?userid=$1
But I wouldn’t use such URLs. They don’t make sense when you think of the URL path as a hierarchy and the path segments as their levels.
Then you can just use RewriteRule directive in a .htacces like:
RewriteRule roberts-clothing-store/store/(\d+)/(\d+)$ store.php?storeid=$1&page=$2 [L]
See http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/mod/mod_rewrite.html for help, or google.
RewriteRule ^roberts-clothing-store/store/([^.]+)/([^.]+)$ store.php?id=$1&page=$2
RewriteRule ^robert-ashcroft/user/([^.]+)$ profile.php?userid=$1
My approach is to make the .htaccess as easy as possible and to do all the hard work in PHP:
RewriteRule ^(.*?)$ index.php?$1
This basically means to take everything and reroute it to my index.php file (in css/javascript/image directories I simply use "RewriteEngine off" to grand access to these files). In PHP I than just split("/", $param, 5) the string and run a foreach() to check all the parameters. Encapsulated in a nice function this works fine for me.
Update:
For this easy case I highly recommend the use of explode() instead of using split(), because explode() doesn't come with the overhead by using regular expressions.