Virtual directories in PHP

scottybowl

Hi,

Just a quick overview before I get down to the nitty gritty.

I am developing a website which is membership based - i.e people can register on the site. I want each member to have their own "page". For example, let's say user "tomjones" registers with the site, I want them to be able to go to www.mysite.com/tomjones and have it display their page.

Obviously, the original way would be to do something like www.mysite.com/memberspage.php?id=tomjones

It's messy, hard for the member to remember, and not good for search engine optimisation.

I do not have root access on my host (i.e the ability to alter the Apache configuration) so that is not an option. I've been looking into htaccess modification but can't find anything that seems to match what I want to do.

In addition, what happens if I have some REAL folders? eg. www.mysite.com/stats. I wouldnt want any scripts to think "stats" was a user page..

I would appreciate any help that you can give me, whether it be a link to a tutorial or giving me a bit of advice on this forum.

Thanks in advance 🙂

Scott

rebelo

Remember that PHP is a script parsing language. When people go to www.mysite.com/tomjones, PHP doesn't see the request at all. Apache receives the request, decides what to do with it and, if appropriate, it passes the script to PHP to be processed.

What you want to do requires modifications to be made above PHP so that Apache recognizes the "folder" as a variable to feed to PHP. I have never done this, but I have a feeling Apache's mod_rewrite might be a good place to start. However, if you don't have any access at all to Apache setup, you are S.O.L. anyways.

cyberlew15

most external webhosts do not allow mod_rewrite and will charge you for themseleves to set up. I hate mod rewrite but if your server can use .htaccess files then yo can set an extension for php to execute all of the info on this is on apaches documentation http://apache.org/docs

basically use addhandler application/php5 to files without an extension and you can have the page called that way