I am missing the big picture -- search engine friendly URL

brauchi

I am now looking around for days to figure out how to make the search engine friendly links. but somehow nothing works for me. And I have to say that i really don't understand what i have to do.

I tried to use the .htaccess version where i can tell the system that a page is a php page although it has no extension. but it didn't work.

But i think the main problem is that I don't understand how i can later on retrieve the data when i type the url http://www.mydomain.com/articles/755

I read that I need to change the PATH variable. But where do I do this? Do I have to do it on each page I am using? Or am i just rewriting my links and change the PATH once (but where....????)

right now my links are looking like this:
http://www.paris-marketplace.com/ar...p?articleId=755

As I said earlier. I am really missing the big picture. And I appreciate every little help. This is the first php page i built and i need to do something so we get better search engine placements.

Thank you in advance.

andrea
ps. do i have to mention that I am a woman??? ;-)

Tj_C

Andrea,

I am not sure what you are trying to accomplish.

Can you provide an example of what you want to do?

Also you may not want to have that elipse (...) in a URL.

eoghain

There is a great article on this site that walks through how to do this: http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/tim19990117.php3 and http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/tim19990117.php3

But the basic idea is that you tell your Web Server that it needs to send any requests for a given URL to a specific php script. This is done with the AliasMatch command using Apache. Here is an example from my own site that works just fine.

   AliasMatch /images/(.*)      "/web/mysite/images/$1"
   AliasMatch /javascript/(.*)  "/web/mysite/includes/$1"
   AliasMatch /templates/(.*)   "/web/mysite/templates/$1"
   AliasMatch /article/(.*)     "/web/mysite/public-html/main.html/$1"
   AliasMatch /recipe/(.*)      "/web/mysite/public-html/main.html/$1"

Here I have 5 directories that I'm telling Apache how to deal with. Whenever someone comes to mysite and requests a URL that ends in /images/ with anything following it, Apache will look in the directory /web/mysite/images/ for the value following the above requested image. Now that is the basics and just shows how someone can request from me an image and it will be pulled from a directory that is outside of my webroot.

What you want to do is more like my last 2 entries above one goes to articles and the other to revipies. So if a user was requesting a specific article they'd go to a URL on my site like www.mysite.com/article/1 and Apache would send that request to my main.html page. Now my main.html page has some work to do to make the article appear:

   $url_array = explode("/", $REQUEST_URI);
   $section = $url_array[1];

Now what this code does is break apart the request URI to get the pieces that I'm interested in. This is the type of request made, in this case article. Now that I know the user is requesting an article I can pull out the other parts of the URI that will be needed for my code to display the article.

   switch($section) {
      case "article":
         include "$INCLUDES/mysite/article.php";
         $a_id = $url_array[2];

     if ($a_id == "submit") {
        // Do somthing with submitted data
        }
     elseif ($a_id == "post") {
        // Do something with posted data
     else {
           $html = getArticle($db,$a_id);
           }
        }
     break;

Now for my code there are 3 different pieces of information that could exist after the /article/ part of the URI. I could either have a simple number of an article as I display above, or I could be posting or submitting data. Since we are talking about displaying an article I've omitted the unneeded code. Now that I know I'm going to be displaying an article and I've gotten the ID of the article to display all I need to do is get the article. I do this by calling a helper function and giving it my database connection and the article ID to retrieve. This will return the article from the database for me, which I capture and display later when the rest of the page has been built.

I hope this helps, but I really recommend reading the articles above they were great helps to me in building my site.

andymoo

you might like to try this as a solution:

in your .htacces

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^{(.*)-cheeses.html} /cheeses.php?cheese=$1

then calling yourdomain.com/smoked-cheeses.html in the browser will in effect call cheeses.php?cheese=smoked

(.) is $1 further instances of (.) are $2 $3 and so on.....

i can say that this method works as we get tonnes of non-cheese related traffic each month! 😉 it's highly spiderable www.web2txt.co.uk/ is a good example of what i've done with it.

hth

brauchi

Originally posted by andymoo
you might like to try this as a solution:

in your .htacces

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^{(.*)-cheeses.html} /cheeses.php?cheese=$1

then calling yourdomain.com/smoked-cheeses.html in the browser will in effect call cheeses.php?cheese=smoked

(.) is $1 further instances of (.) are $2 $3 and so on.....

i can say that this method works as we get tonnes of non-cheese related traffic each month! 😉 it's highly spiderable www.web2txt.co.uk/ is a good example of what i've done with it.

hth

When i am doing this i get an internal server error. can this be becasue i don't have the rewrite module for my usage?

andymoo

We've got mod_rewrite and a stack of modules loaded on our setup, if you check your phpinfo() it will say if that module is there or not.

If it is then I'd say watch out for any odd characters in your .htaccess file and make sure it's properly formatted, there have been a couple of times when I've been working on this kinda thing and it's done a 500 on me, only cos I messed it up somewhere.

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/mod/mod_rewrite.html looks like as much fun as having a tooth pulled so I'm extra grateful it's standard on my config. It does mention error 500's in there incase you've got it in, have had a tinker and still keep getting them.

"Despite the tons of examples and docs, mod_rewrite is voodoo. Damned cool voodoo, but still voodoo."
Brian Moore - no relation 😉

Sorry I can't help any further. All the best.

brauchi

Originally posted by eoghain
But the basic idea is that you tell your Web Server that it needs to send any requests for a given URL to a specific php script. This is done with the AliasMatch command using Apache. Here is an example from my own site that works just fine.
   AliasMatch /images/(.*)      "/web/mysite/images/$1"
   AliasMatch /javascript/(.*)  "/web/mysite/includes/$1"
   AliasMatch /templates/(.*)   "/web/mysite/templates/$1"
   AliasMatch /article/(.*)     "/web/mysite/public-html/main.html/$1"
   AliasMatch /recipe/(.*)      "/web/mysite/public-html/main.html/$1"
QUOTE]
This sounds like a solution I can understand. there is just one question left. where shall i put the alias matches? is this for the htaccess file?

this board is really great. i am always getting some good answers here. and i am sorry that sometimes it is hard for me to follow things when i never saw how this worked by myself.

thank you

andrea