Hello guys,

Looking for a bit of your expert advice....again!. I have been given the task to change this website: www.aneye4style.com from dynamic pages to static pages. can anyone give any advice on how one goes about doing this please?....any suggestions, advice, possible change of software, any advice whatsoever you can offer is very much appreciated. the site is run from an admin panel, so that new entries can be added to the directory by the site administrator.

Cheers guys.

you have allot of work ahead of you, making it dynamic is the vastly better way.

each page to its own, each one will have to be made as is, copy and paste will be your friend here

Generate each page, copy the content into new pages, then update the links.

But why would you want to change a dynamic website into a static one?! That's kinda taking a step in the wrong direction if you ask me...

The reason the client has asked for this is so the urls are static, and obviously search engines will index the static pages, whereas they wont index dynamic ones....is this correct?

I dont know whether i have explained the situation correctly...not sure. I want the sites functions to remain the same, but when the directory is updated by the admin panel...for example, another resource is added, i want the finished files to be exported to static URL's.....can this be done easily? whats the process? any help is very much appreciated.

I dont acctually mean actual static pages, just static to search engines so instead of being
index.php?cat=dfmkdmf&id=7&search=475 etc etc

index.php/music/band.htm

thats exactly the task i am trying to accomplish

actually SEs can index "dynamic" URLs just as well as "static" URLs

But that site won't be crawled in a month of Sundays, simply because the navigation is in a form and crawlers can't submit forms!

It does have a non-form navigable architecture, Chris. It's just buried below the Google Adsense.

swiftmed: what you want is a custom 404. I haven't done it with PHP, but I have with ASP. If done properly, you can use it to simulate static URLs by redirecting them using the custom 404 (which by default will return a status of 200, the general "EVERYTHING IS OKAY Homer Simpson Alarm" code, unless you specify otherwise.)

http://members.cox.net/midian/tutorials/php404.htm

That might help (although if it doesn't, don't shoot the messenger...I've never tried it.)

What you need is URL re-writing. Your web server is telling me it's Apache, therefore you need to use mod_rewrite. Google is your friend

It does have a non-form navigable architecture, Chris. It's just buried below the Google Adsense.

So it is!

Fancy that the adsense (and the affiliate adverts) being more important than the site navigation

You're just being picky, Chris. You want to use the site and try to find stuff on it...YOU'RE SPOSTA BE CLICKING THE ADS, DAMMIT.

{Sorry folks, I didn't realize "Submit" was highlighted when I tried to do a new line. Can somebody delete this one please?}

Originally Posted by swiftmed

I dont acctually mean actual static pages, just static to search engines so instead of being
index.php?cat=dfmkdmf&id=7&search=475 etc etc

index.php/music/band.htm

thats exactly the task i am trying to accomplish

PHP has a $PATH_INFO variable that holds whatever is after index.php. In your example that would be /music/band.html. I used this to good effect on a website that I no longer have live. I used a simple five digit code to tell me what to include, but you can expand that as much as you need.

The page was linked like this: index.php/11033. To get "11033" I used this line of code:
$whatTask = substr($PATH_INFO, 1, strlen($PATH_INFO) - 1);
This got rid of the / after index.php. Then just include that file, like so. (Note that I dropped the .htm from your original URL.)

include($DOCUMENT_ROOT."/includes/".$whatTask.".inc");

This would pull the info from the file at www.yourdomain.com/includes/music/band.inc. And yes, I realize I stripped out the / from $PATH_INFO just to put another one in there. I changed horses mid-stream. Sorry.

It's my understanding based on reading the PHP site that this looks just fine to a search engine but still gives you ther flexibility of dynamic pages. Please let me know if I can help further.

Sorry, but why is this topic contiuing?

If bots weren't able to crawl through dynamic URLs, then a lot of sites wouldn't have been indexed as deeply as they have, especially blogs.

AFAIK, it depends on how complex the query string is. I remember reading this on Google somewhere... they said that if it's just 1 or 2 simple parameters on the query string, it will be crawled - but if there's loads, it will most likely skip it.

I'm not sure exactly where to draw the line, the only way to know would be to look at the source code of the crawler.........

3 parameters is about the limit generally. But as with all things SE related it isn't an absolute. There are many sites that get indexed fully with 4 or more parameters

With a Mod_rewrite....does it just edit the url or does it redirect it to another page?

It just edits ('rewrites') it. There's no redirect and it's completely transparent to the browser.

It amuses me that WT uses mod_rewrite. What's the decision reasoning there?

Is this a question directed at me or to the owners of the site?