Tricky question about URL parsing

[alexei999]

Hi there,

Tricky question:
Does anybody out there know how to do something like this:
we have a website and a registered user can generate a website for himself, the url to the website is going to be a first part of the email, so for the email:
[e-mail]
the username is gonna be mywebsite.name

what we're trying to do is to use his first part of the email for his own website url for example by going to:
http://www.website.com/mywebsite_name
or
http://www.website.com/mywebsite_name/
(with or without slash)
it would show his website, and if instead it was john_doe, it would be John Doe's website.

all websites are template generated and running from the database, what we want to do is:
not to have the actual folders like (mywebsite_name or john_doe) on the server and instead read the URL take the part after http://www.website.com/ (or maybe something lile http://website.com/customsite/) and use it as a website user name to pull out the appropriate data for the pages to be filled in from the database.

can anybody tell me if its possible and if no what are other solutions ...

all this is running on IIS server.

Thanks,
Alex.

[br__ken]

im not sure if you mean something like this. but it will grab his dirname (ex; http://site.com/johndoeswebsite/ would = johndoeswebsite/)

and grab the username by taking away the swebsite/

$u="http://zbdesign.biz/johndoeswebsite/";
$a=pathinfo($u);
$path=$a['basename'] . ((substr($a['basename'],-1,1)!="/")?"/":"");
$user=str_replace("swebsite/","",$path);

echo "users url=" . $path . " - user=" . $user;

[examancer]

this might help:

http://www.promotionbase.com/article/485

[juschillinnow]

$email = "[e-mail]";
$split = split("@", $email);
$website = $split[0];
if(preg_match("//", $website))
{
$website = ereg_replace("", " ", $website)
}

Then put this value in the mysql database and reference all pages with this value somewhere in the column.

When getting things out, just use it by name such as:

$query = "select * from table where site = '$website'";

Well this is kinda vague, but should point you in the right direction

[alexei999]

the example that examancer showed me is exactly what i need to do, (this might help: http://www.promotionbase.com/article/485)

except that I need to do it under IIS
does something like that "look back" feature exist on IIS? or just some kind of virtual directory that would read only
/website/
from http://www.site.com/website/John_Doe or from http://www.site.com/website/John_Doe/
and it has to keep that John_Doe somewhere (hopefully it can keep it in URL), so I can read it at least once to store in cookies or something, or it could redirect from http://www.site.com/website/John_Doe/ to something like
http://www.site.com/website/?John_Doe may be.

[alexei999]

so does anybody know if its possible on IIS ?

[examancer]

try it. then we can all find out.

[examancer]

sorry, pressed submit twice.

[bobthedog]

I have done something like this before, and I found the best way to do it was to use the mod_rewrite calls in a .htaccess file.

This allows you to have url's like www.site.com/fred_bloggs/

You place the .htaccess with the mod_rewrite calls in the root directory of the site and set it to rewrite the URL to www.site.com/decipher.php (or whatever you want to call it).

From your script, you can recall the original page which was called from $SCRIPT_URL (I think) or $PHP_SELF. The actual scripts name is available in $SCRIPT_NAME.

There is a good article on this at http://www.alistapart.com/stories/succeed/ which describes the basics and should get you started. You may want to brush up on your regular expressions in order to write the rules for the site.

Of course, it relies on the fact that your ISP have mod_rewrite installed 🙂

The benefit of this method is that you can hide all your scripts names (if you are clever) without anyone (well, most people!) knowing they ever existed, and allows you to provide a decent virtual directory system.

As to IIS, I am not so sure of a method to do it in this system. IIS provides a virtual directory system, so I am guessing that there must be a way to do it someone, probably with some custom objects which allow you to set these up on the fly (without having to do it manually) and set where they point to.

Anyhow - hope this helps ya