Using PHP for Site Templates

[Viserov]

This is been bugging me, and I can't seem to find an answer on Google or a search here, because it's hard to explain (and therefore, search for).

I know there's a PHP setting or function where you can have http://www.mydomain.com/abc/ actually go to http://www.mydomain.com/page.php?id=abc. I don't think it's a page redirect or anything, because there won't actually be a '/abc/' directory on the server. I can't remember the name of that function/setting... does anyone have any ideas, or am I being a little confusing?

Thanks!

[Alex Suraci]

Use a .htaccess file for this. Example -

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteBase /

RewriteRule ^?(.*)/ /page.php?id=$1 [QSA,L]
</IfModule>

I'm no pro with .htaccess, but that should work. So, if you went to site.com/whatever it would use /page.php?id=whatever, same goes for /abc and etc.

[Viserov]

Thanks! That's exactly what I was looking for! :)

[metal_dragen Veteran]

By the way, just for clarification, this is not a function of PHP. It's called mod_rewrite and is a module for the Apache web server. You can achieve a similar effect in PHP, using just PHP (for example, if you do not have mod_rewrite installed on your server, and do not have access to install it); the resulting links would look basically the same, just using slashes instead of the ? and & (for instance, /product.php?id=123&page=description could be become /product.php/123/description/).

[keitheronie]

Metal_dragen, how would you achieve such an effect using just PHP? Is it possible to do the same in PHP?

[metal_dragen Veteran]

It's a similar effect. So, instead of your links looking like:

http://www.example.com/product/123/description

they would look like this:

http://www.example.com/product.php/123/description

Notice that the second example contains the actual file name of the script (product.php). You are still giving the effect of SE friendly URLs by not using the ? to denote the query string and &s to separate variables. Instead you use the slash. All you would do, instead of using the $_GET array to access the variables, you would use the $_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'] or $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] variables to get the query string or full URI respectively, and then do some parsing magic in your script to split it into meaningful and usable pieces.