well... my title pretty much says it all,

is there a way to do this?

so if i have a php /mysql driven site, can i auto create pages into html for better search engine listings...?

When the page gets sent to the browser IT IS STATIC HTML.

Maybe he means instead of having something like.

article.php?a=12345

having

/article/Article_title.html

There are ways of doing this (blogs and message boards have mods to allow this) but it would be a fairly large undertaking.

PHP Code:

ob_start();
print 'blah blah blah';
$html=ob_get_clean();
file_put_contents('file.html',$html); 


And so, you have generated a page, and saved the result to an html file

Originally Posted by tosbourn

Maybe he means instead of having something like.

article.php?a=12345

having

/article/Article_title.html

There are ways of doing this (blogs and message boards have mods to allow this) but it would be a fairly large undertaking.

once you get the hang of it, it is really rather easy.

if your running an Apache server you will need mod_rewrite installed and configured.

after that you just edit your .htaccess file to contain something like this

1: RewriteEngine on
2: RewriteRule ^article/([^/\.]+)/?$ viewarticle.php?id=$1 [L]
3: RewriteRule ^section/([0-9]+)/?$ viewsection.php?id=$1 [L]
4: RewriteRule ^section/([a-z]+)/?$ viewsection.php?id=$1 [L]

Line one tells the site to use mod_rewrite
Line two tells the serv that if it gets something like www.yoursite.com/article/42 that its the same thing as if you typed www.yoursite.com/viewarticle.php?id=42

line two accepts just about everything
line three will only accept a string of numbers
and line four will only accept a string of letters

keep in mind that the [L] must be at the end of each line

do a google search for mod_rewrite it will go into much more depth and explain how to write the rewrite rules in much greater detail

Originally Posted by chrishirst

When the page gets sent to the browser IT IS STATIC HTML.

The difference exists. When you have physical html file the webserver can handle if-modified-since, send date and content-length headers and so on. This will help the webserver to behave correctly from the search engine's point of view. In absolutely most cases people who use dynamic output do not bother with handling if-modified-since and sending date and content-length.

Also serving static files is usually hundreds times faster.

This will help the webserver to behave correctly from the search engine's point of view

Assuming of course that search engines actually use those headers.

Also serving static files is usually hundreds times faster.

Hardly hundreds of times faster, a few nanoseconds maybe, or a few microseconds if your code has to wait for a DB server response for several queries. If your "dynamic" pages are hundreds of times slower you have a MUCH bigger problem.

Oh and BTW

so if i have a php /mysql driven site, can i auto create pages into html for better search engine listings...?

It will make absolutely no difference at all!

Originally Posted by chrishirst

Hardly hundreds of times faster, a few nanoseconds maybe, or a few microseconds if your code has to wait for a DB server response for several queries. If your "dynamic" pages are hundreds of times slower you have a MUCH bigger problem.

My website serves 350k pageviews daily. On local machine (to exclude network lags) ab shows 110 requests per second (-n 100 -c 10) on dynamic page. On static page this number is about 2.5k. I made a mistake with hundreds of times, but we can talk about tens times difference.

Requests per second is a different thing entirely to serving out the pages.