How to make an "alias" URL?

[Dolemite50]

Hello,

I have a site which has artists who have created their own Artist Page. Currently, I am using their user id to determine their site like this:

www.mysite.com/artistpage.php?artist_id=1342

And I am getting alot of requests to have it be

www.mysite.com/artistName

I am assuming that in order to do this I would have to create a new folder for each artist and name their artist page index.php.
That sounds like an ocaen of work, is there any other way to just have the URL resolve to the actual URL?

Sorry, hard to word that one.

Thanks alot

[bastien]

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/misc/rewriteguide.html

[dewen]

It's hard to configure apache rewrite module for beginners, and it easy to get trouble. So use with caution.

There are two ways to configure the rewrite as I know. One is configure in httpd.conf

I prefer another simple way by add a .htaccess under the directory. In your case, it's www.mysite.com's web root

with following setting:
###################
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^{([A-Za-z]+)[/]?$} artistpage.php?artist_name=$1 [L]
###################

This is the way it work, but you may need spend some time to try it out. I didn't test it

[Dolemite50]

Is that mod_rewrite?

From what I've read that may be just what I'm looking for. Does anybody know of any tutorials?

[bastien]

try this one

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/guide-url-rewriting

[Dolemite50]

Thanks Bastien,

I'll check it out.