Weird site PHP coding style - how to do it? Need help

intec

Hi,

I have a question regarding how the website http://www.gotfrag.com/ was setup. It is done with PHP, but I've never seen it done in the fashion that it has before. It seems if you hover your mouse over any of the links that instead of a page, each link is in it's own directory somewhat -- example:

http://www.gotfrag.com/cs/user/
http://www.gotfrag.com/cs/user/signout/
http://www.gotfrag.com/cs/community/9453/
http://www.gotfrag.com/cs/user/67826/
http://www.gotfrag.com/cs/user/bio/

Now.. are each of those their OWN directory? /cs/ would be a directory with a /user/ directory.. and then say a /signout/ directory and a /bio/ directory each with a index.php? And from there that index page just calls the config.php or whatever from a previous directory? Or what?

And how do they get the userID after the /user/#### part.. it seems that the user ID is in its own folder, but if you try to access say a fake id by typing a random number, it'll say that # doesn't exist, which makes be believe its not a directory...

Can anyone shed some light on this, I've never seen any PHP coding/programming like this..

Thanks

swr

There's at least two ways to do it...

The simplest way is probably to use PATH_INFO, although it normally requires you to have a .php file in the path. If you have a script here:
http://www.example.com/yourscript.php
and call it like so:
http://www.example.com/yourscript.php/foo/bar
then yourscript.php will be run with $_SERVER['PATH_INFO'] set to "/foo/bar".

The other way is using Apache's mod_rewrite, which allows the server to change URLs around. So it could turn (for example) this:
http://www.example.com/foo/bar
into this: http://www.example.com/yourscript.php?section=foo&subsection=bar
in such a way that the web browser only sees the original URL. Using mod_rewrite lets you do other things too, like redirect all requests for .asp files into requests for .php files (handy if you've ported a site and want the old URLs to work). Google for "mod_rewrite" for more info.