Major site overhaul-URL help needed please

[Dolemite50]

Hi,

I currently have a site that has all of its members with a unique userid. It is a music site so the URL's look similar to this:

www.mysite.com/bandpage.php?bandid=1234

Members are strongly requesting that it be changed to reflect their acutal band name such as this:
www.mysite.com/thenameoftheband

What direction would you go in here? I know whatever it is it will be pretty major so I'm hoping for some good advice before I dive in.

Thanks

[thorpe]

if your on apache google for mod_rewrite tutorials.

[Weedpacket]

mod_alias may be enough for this task (it looks like a straight 1-1 mapping):

Alias /thenameoftheband /bandpage.php?bandid=1234

If you want to look more into robust URL design, an essay by Sir Tim himself can be found here.

[Dolemite50]

Hi,

I posted in the mod_rewrite forum two days ago with no responses so I thought I'd give it a shot here:

I created a query that updated the band_page table and now I have three columns (actually more) for Band Name, bandid, and URL. URL is just the band name after being run through a make_browser_friendly function so that it reads similar to "the-band-name".

Ok, now I would really like to avoid recoding 1000's of pages on my site that point in the old method. e.g. /bandpage.php?bandid=1234

Ideally, I would like to leave the link to the band page as above, when it gets to that page it runs a query in mysql to extract the URL, and then rewrites the URL to reflect it.

So,..a link says CLICK HERE and points to /bandpage.php?bandid=1234
I extract the bandid with a GET statement, I then run a mysql query to get the URL from the URL column in the database, and finally, I rewrite the url to say mysite.com/the-band-name.

Any suggestions?