I'm currently mid-development with a new cms, probably my fourth or so revamp. What I've learned from experiences is that having a URL such as "site.com/blah.php?id=2342&author=blah&blah=blah" is bad for a couple reasons. It seems to result in problems when search engines crawl your pages, as well as it doesn't look very pretty in the users address bar.
On many sites, you would see something such as "theirsite.com/dvd/irobot.html". I would like to know how to accomplish this.
Perhaps this is the wrong forum though, I'm really not sure. I've heard that something called Apache_Mod can accomplish this, but I've really had no success in understanding examples and tutorials of how this utility works.
The only other alternative I can see to something like this Apache_Mod feature is to have the directories and files created upon, for example, review submission. Reviews are just an example I'm using, anything would apply. However, I see problems with this in terms of, if the page would have to be edited. Then I suppose the information on the page would also have to be stored in the database for editing, and the files for it would need to be overwritten with the edited ones.
This process seems hassle-some, and avoidable I'd think. From my very small grasp of how the Apache_Mod works, it would take a URL request like the one above, "theirsite.com/dvd/irobot.html" , and basically mirror a page that would take aspects of that url and use them as variables. So the above address might actually mirror something like, "theirsite.com/handler.php?type=dvd&name=irobot". I could be completely wrong though, and please tell me if I am.
Any help would be much appreciated, I tried to be as clear as I could in explaining all of this, although alot of it is confusing to me.
edit: apache_mod = mod_rewrite
