mod rewrite

phresh

Frustrated and dejected. The goal is to make my long query strings search engine friendly. My partner and I have been experimenting with mod_rewrite and cannot get it to work. We are using PHP/MySQL.. I have read the article on this and dont quite understand. Please point me in a direction I can go. At this point I dont care if we use mod_rewrite or a php script to accomplish the same thing. I am looking for a quick resolution to my problem. Thank you.

[deleted]

Maybe a simple example will help?

Let's say you had a URL like:

http://codewalkers.com/seecode.php?id=114

and you want people to use the url:

http://codewalkers.com/seecode/114.html

Place this in your .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^seecode/(.*)\.html$ /seecode.php?id=$1

OK, now for a little bit longer example, say you have this:

http://codewalkers.com/tutorials.php?show=12&page=6

and you want people to use the url:

http://codewalkers.com/tutorials/12/6/

use this in your .htaccess:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^tutorials/(.*)/(.*)/$ /tutorials.php?show=$1&page=$2

Joan_Collins

I had some trouble getting mod rewrite to work also...

Another solution is to explode the path in your script (you just insert it near the start), ie:

list($dummy, $page, $id) = explode('/', $PATH_INFO);

The $dummy variable seemed superfluous when I was first shown this method, but including it doesn't seem to hurt (I should have experimented without it, but I was so relieved to solve the problem I had quickly moved on to something else) - the variables following are up to you, according to how many queries you're running in the path.

Basically this will replace the question marks with slashes - for example:

http://www.mydomain.com/index.php?page=full&id=7

becomes

http://www.mydomain.com/index.php/full/7

It's a decent workaround if mod rewrite is proving a problem. To get rid of the .php extension, this worked for me in .htaccess:

Options +MultiViews
DirectoryIndex index index.html

Which made my URL:

http://www.mydomain.com/index/full/7

Of course, for it all to come together, you have to change any links that occur on your pages - so if you have links such as ?page=full&id=3 etc, you'll want to change them to full/3 and so on.

I think mod rewrite is a more comprehensive way of doing things, but this works as an alternative.

piyushshah

Hi,

Just follow this link for different ways to implement search engine friendly urls.

http://www.webmasterbase.com/article/910

Hope this helps.

Piyush

phresh

Tonight is the night (thursday) My partner and I will sit down and try to see what the problem is. Thanks for all the help. I will reply the second we have a working module! Since the introduction of querystrings to our website it has suffered a two position drop on google and even more drastic drops on other search engines resulting in loss of visitors. Any new information or resources for a step by step instruction would be helpful. Is there a way to test if the module was installed correctly?
Thanks again
Phresh

stephen

mod_rewrite is not working out all that well for me and my current hosting service does not support the module for help. I'm looking for alternatives to keep clean urls.

The suggestion above looks good but was looking for other options.

I have considered using folders and dropping a single index file calling the needed functions but thats a few too many files to manage.

Another option similar to the one above is to send all 404 errors back to a single php file in the root and use $vars = explode("/",$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']); to pull the url into variables. Problem with this is all page requests would be 404 errors.

Any ideas?

phresh

FINALLY got it working....🙂 Turns out the mod. was not installed properly on the server. After much fussing and a few thinly veiled threats my hosting service (OLM) got on the ball and re-installed the module and flipped the switches. They do not support Mod_Rewrite either..Infact I felt like a vampire with the crosses coming out the moment I mentioned Mod_Rewrite. Earlier, we experimented with the PHP solution of 'exploding' the URL's. It worked fine with a few simple lines of code but in our instance it blew a bunch of links and wreaked havoc on our session ID's..Mod is much cleaner.
Thanks to every one that helped us. Thanks a million.
Scott 'Phresh' Freshour

stephen

If I can get mod_rewrite running on my live server that would be great but at the moment i get forbidden errors as soon as I put RewriteEngine On in the .htaccess file. (But they do tell me it is installed)