Hi,

I'm just finishing creating a site that is almost entirely database driven... from the content to the graphics, it's all stored in databases to easily swap things in and out. What I'm wondering though is how to make my urls more user friendly so that people don't have to either: 1) start at the index page every time or 2) have to remember a url that is littered with variables. Also, this site has over three thousand "pages", each a belonging to a seperate business... so having to hard-code friendly urls isn't an economical option. Any suggestions or perhaps documentation out there concerning this? I've done some searching and haven't turned up much that's helpful.

Thanks

Hello Junior Talker.

Do you know Joomla?
Joomla is a great system, with all ressourses.
If you don't know, please visit www.joomla.org

Samuel de Sousa Santos

I don't know exactly what you can do, but on my websites (which helds thousands of pages too), I use variables.
You CAN also use URLs like this: http://www.domain.com/business-categ...-name-here.php
I rather use variables like this www.domain.com/business.php?id=[businessID]
Not too hard to remember.

Originally Posted by tsanders

Hi,

I'm just finishing creating a site that is almost entirely database driven... from the content to the graphics, it's all stored in databases to easily swap things in and out. What I'm wondering though is how to make my urls more user friendly so that people don't have to either: 1) start at the index page every time or 2) have to remember a url that is littered with variables. Also, this site has over three thousand "pages", each a belonging to a seperate business... so having to hard-code friendly urls isn't an economical option. Any suggestions or perhaps documentation out there concerning this? I've done some searching and haven't turned up much that's helpful.

Thanks

If the site is driven by database then I hope you can create urls dynamically as well.

Let us take an example: if you have products in several categories you can format the url structure as: http://www.yoursite.com/products/<category-name>/<product-name>/product-<id>

Now using your htaccess you parse the url and get the last item after "/" which is product-<id> so you run product.php like this product.php?productid=<id>

Hope that helps.

Instead of using the $_GET super global you could do domething like this.

http://www.yoursite.com/index.php/value1/value2/article_name-51.html

PHP Code:

$url = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
$urlArray = explode("/",$url); 


Returns

Array
(
    [0] => index.php
    [1] => value1
    [2] => value2
    [3] => article_name-51.html
)

PHP Code:

$pageArray = explode("-",$urlArray[3]); 


Returns

Array
(
    [0] => article_name
    [1] => 51.html
)

PHP Code:

 $pageId = stristr($pageArray[1], '.html', true);
//$pageId = 51
$pageName = $pageArray[0];
//$pageName = article_name 


This is not tested, just off the top of my head, but should work.

Regards, George

Personally I'm accustomed to bryansmith's method for using .htaccess mod_rewrite. That's how I've always done it and it works for me. Turning them into flat links.

I found it a little complex when I first tried it... but after doing it once or twice I got the hang of it.

This looks like a good article (although I admit I only skimmed it):
http://corz.org/serv/tricks/htaccess2.php

Or google 'mod_rewrite flat links' or something.

Thanks, hope you find a solution that works for you

I do not thinks Joomla is good as far as url is concerned, ugly url! and if you use rewrite, most of the time it returns a page not found error.

You can pick some CMS for your purpose as it will make many things easy for you like Joomla, wordpress or Drupal

If you're set on using your own system, .htaccess and mod_rewrite are the way to go. Using a system like Joomla or WordPress that already has permalinks built in might be easier.

For a full circle of function, you would simply need only mod_rewite to convert the user friendly urls to the php param based url for your page scripts. However, you would need to build a href link output function or class to dynamically build your internal links back to the user friendly url.

for sake of an example:

<a href="<?php echo user_funtion_href('page', $params_array, $request_type); ?>">Link</a>

yeah use .htaccess for the easiest and cleanest solution

Using the above mentioned .htaccess and mod_rewrite, you can make links that look like:

www.site.com/index.php?file=about
(or other more complex things)
to
www.site.com/pages/about
and it would result in the same thing.
An example for the above for an .htaccess file would be something like:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^pages/([^/\.]+)/?$ index.php?file=$1 [L]

so that whatever is after the /pages/ directory, gets automatically put after the index.php?file= line. To the end user, all they see is nice links. While the server sees the full requested URL.

Its best to read up on it and understand it before using it however, as it can be a tad tricky.