/?page vs page.php

generic

I've seen alot of url's like "blah.com/?page" around lately... I'm curious as to what the difference is between that and "blah.com/page.php" or "blah.com/directory"?

The reason I ask is because I'm more of a photoshop type guy and I'd like to 'slickify' the php to match the interface.

Thanks in advance.

-gen

ysu

as far as i know:

blah.com/?page
this simply gives one (or more) 'variable' to the web server on the 'blah.com' and to the index page, which is not visible in the link. if the index is 'index.php'
the full link would look like:
blah.com/index.php?page
well, if it contains something like page=firstpage it's absolutely true. If not, it can also be some kind of url-rewriting 'trick' as well. :-)

blah.com/page.php
it's a simple url, nothing special

blah.com/directory
again, going for the index file in the directory, nothing special.

in every case the index file can be anything depending on the server and server config.

What do you mean by slickify, i cannot tell but i hope i helped a bit.

generic

ok, so what I'm gathering is that it's a way to access different peices of code in the same page ala page.php?id=blah or something to that effect?

Anf by slickify I meant little tricks to get the site looking pro beyond the graphics part..

-gen

ysu

Yes, most of the time it is simple as that.
This actually has nothing to do with the site looking pro or not, it's the way the web works.

generic

No doubt, but I'm always looking for ways to add php functionality to my sites and if something like that is useful for me, then I'm curious as to how I can apply it if needed.

Thanks for the help ysu! 🙂

-gen

Weedpacket

Well, you can pass information to a PHP script via the URL using the standard "?name=value&anothername=anothervalue" syntax, and pck them up in the script in the conventional fashion from the $_GET[] array. Use the values retrieved to decide which bits of code to run; exactly how one uses what to decide which bits depends entirely on how the navigation and stuff is laid out, so I can't really be any more specific than that, but it's basically a steady application of logic.

As for "slickifying", URLs that have dangly querystrings like the above tend to look ugly, and some search engines tend to avoid such pages, so you may want to look at "URL rewriting", to make the URL look like it's for a static page (http://www.example.com/gallery.html instead of http://www.example.com/index.php?page=gallery for example). That's a web-server task, and so implementing it depends on which server you'll be using, but the phrase given above is a good thing to start searching with.

ysu

Weeedpacket: I don't completely agree with you on the search engines. In my experience considering the big engines it did not make a difference.
If you have any real proof of it please tell me, I'm really eager to hear it.

HalfaBee

I have seen urls classed as "search engine friendly", but I think a lot of them are just "user friendly".
Like www.php.net, if you type www.php.net/substr , it gives you the manual page for substr().

I honesly don't think any URL is "search engine friendly" 🙁 if you pay enough it may bee.

HalfaBee

Weedpacket

The big search engines are pretty good; but they're not the only ones out there - and there are spiders working for other things as well.

But you're right about the tidier URLs being more user-friendly - and what's wrong with that?🙂

On the other hand, there is yet another reason for nice URLs that is a significant factor to keep in mind with regard to search engines: stability. If the URL changes then who knows how long it will be before it gets reindexed correctly? In the meantime, Google's pointing to a 404.

elToro

I'm a big fan of friendly URLs. Check out this article for tips on URL re-writing.