10 replies to this topic

[Alexander]

Intro:
Here we will be utilizing the scary .htaccess that most webservers have by default, don't have one? Create a file with the name .htaccess Yes, with the dot with your FTP client in your root web folder and you'll be on the way to utilizing nice urls!

Update: I had written a similar tutorial after this, but for "nice" URL titles of which you can use in your application. An example is turning ?id=41 into ?id=about-us. The tutorial is here:
http://forum.codecal...tles-slugs.html

What does .htaccess do to urls exactly?

Plenty of websites,Including CodeCall here use an Apache feature called mod_rewrite to make urls nicer and cleaner for users and search engines alike. A simple example of the page you may be viewing now is the following:

http://forum.codecall.net/php-tutorials/31271-nice-urls-htaccess-php.html

Well that's nice, but what are we really seeing?.

Here is the actual thread, go ahead and paste it into your browser to see it works:

http://forum.codecall.net/forum/showthread.php?t=268346

The original is boring, glad mod_rewrite was there to fix it!

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Well! Lets get down to examples!:

You may want to spoof your site up in a simple way, yes? Here's your example boring layout:

Layout:
[noparse]http://www.site.com/...x.php?page=home
http://www.site.com/....php?page=about
http://www.site.com/...?page=downloads[/noparse]

Lets transform it a little with a .htaccess file! Here we add it:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?page=$1 [L,QSA]

With that done, and without any actual modifying if your .php files, this will work:

Layout:
[noparse]http://www.site.com/home
http://www.site.com/about
http://www.site.com/downloads[/noparse]

Neat, eh?: The use of the .htaccess file we defined will automatically plug "about" into index.php?page=about.

And that concludes the simple lesson! Enjoy, and be sure to remember if you mess up the .htaccess file it may hand you a scary 500 error on your site, just remove it to fix it and be sure you typed things right.

I will edit back and include more examples when I get the time,

Thank you for reading!

Edited by Alexander, 17 October 2010 - 08:41 PM.
Updated to add link to my other tutorial

[Roger]

Nice, tutorial, Nullw0rm. I love using .htaccess with all of my sites.

[profzor101]

Thanks ALOT Nullworm, I just tested it out and it worked perfectly for my site, this is such a neat tool.

[Alexander]

Thanks!

[profzor101]

Awesome, My main site doesn't use an index with GET though, the layout is somewhat like this:

/login.php
/register.php
/startup.php
/SOAP.php

how would I rewrite it so I can go to myurl.com/about and it go directly to myurl.com/about.php? I'm actually quite excited about it,
greets, Profzor101.

[Alexander]

This is a fairly simple one, all we need to rewrite it into the filename, notice how I use the regular expression to match and the position of $1 can be changed to suit your needs

#login => login.php
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.php [L,QSA]

Glad I could help. :)

[bbqroast]

Does this mean I can have all my tutorials with neat adresses (e.g. localhost/tutorials/Begining_HTML) without mucking around with my CSS adresses??

[Alexander]

bbqroast said:

Does this mean I can have all my tutorials with neat adresses (e.g. localhost/tutorials/Begining_HTML) without mucking around with my CSS adresses??

From what you've said, you don't need to change anything. It only affects a file that doesn't exists, "Begining_HTML" is not a real file, so .htaccess takes care of it, but any image or css document does exist (a direct URL) so it will appear normally.

[lancewhear]

top code man... tried it out, each link kept referring back to the home page...

http://www.concit.co..._1_Welcome.html

http://www.concit.co...ig Reviews.html

any ideas??

[Alexander]

lancewhear said:

top code man... tried it out, each link kept referring back to the home page..

My code would convert this:
concit.com/organisations/sydneysongwriters/1_1_Welcome.html
into this:
concit.com/organisations/sydneysongwriters/index.php?p=1_1_Welcome.html

Both your addresses are not using .htaccess rewrites though it seems, they both link to the homepage anyway, how are you using it?

[lancewhear]

at first i put the rewrite in the root directory to see if it did anything, then i put it in the .htaccess folder where the index.php n everything else trees down from.