[RESOLVED] Mod_rewrite for urls with ids?

Yari

Hi,

My website uses the following URl to get info from a database:

index.php?id=1

where id=1 is page 1 in the database.

I'm interested in making this URl more user friendly, using mod_rewrite for Apache.
e.g. www.mysite.com/about/
goes to
index.php?id=2

This doesn't work though, as I need to tell php what id I am passing, not just the page name.
So it would work using:
www.mysite.com/about/2

My question is, since I use id numbers, not page names, to uniquely identifiy my pages, is there any way to NOT use the id in the URl?
It doesn't seem possible, any ideas?

p.s. is it such a bad thing to have the URl showing:
www.mysite.com/about/2
??

bradgrafelman

Yari wrote:
p.s. is it such a bad thing to have the URl showing:
www.mysite.com/about/2
??

If you ask me, no. I really don't have a problem showing a bunch of information in the URL.

You could hardcode URL's like /about/ if you took the time to write everything out in a .htaccess file (and if mod_rewrite was available):

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^about/?$ index.php?id=2
RewriteRule ^contact/?$ index.php?id=3
RewriteRule ^help/?$ index.php?id=4
RewriteRule ^etc/?$ index.php?id=5

Basically, if you enter http://mysite.com/about OR http://mysite.com/about/ you'll be quietly redirected to http://mysite.com/index.php?id=2 .

If you want to require the trailing slash, remove the question mark before the dollar sign in all of the patterns.

Alternatively, to use the "/name/id/" method you talked about, i.e. /about/2/, you could do this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^.+/([0-9]+)/?$ index.php?id=$1

Yari

Hmmm, a shame, its about what I had expected. But then again, sometimes there is a really elegant solution out there...

Thanks for your time, I don't think I will go the hard-coding route, probably stick with what I have or use the '/name/id/' idea.

Cheers

Weedpacket

One alternative to hardcoding might be to rewrite http://www.example.com/about/ as http://www.example.com/index.php?id=about - in other words, use "about" as the identifier, rather than "2". If necessary, an array of valid identifiers and their corresponding ID numbers could be kept and have index.php look in there to make the appropriate mapping.

Yari

Yes, i see.

An interesting idea, but I would like to steer away from using names are identifiers... mainly because of the element of human error in the db. As its for a CMS I rarely update, best to stick with id's. No duplicates, easy indexing etc.

For this reason if I do use the mod_rewrite, it would be something like:

www.mysite.com/2/about/

rather than

www.mysite.com/about/2/

, just in case someone puts in:

www.mysite.com/latest 'n greatest news from issue #blah blah/2/

and breaks the string... obviously some rigorous error checking could help prevent this, but i'll stick with the safer option.

Seeing as the sites using this cms are indexed quite well in Google already, its not a major issue.

Thanks Weedpacket.