[RESOLVED] how to mod rewrite without ids?

Yari

Not sure if this is the right place to post on apache mod rewrite, but its been discussed on these forums so here goes:

How to some websites such as Blogs etc have a nice urls like:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/review-juice/
http://bokardo.com/archives/five-principles-to-design-by/

without an id?

They are surely database driven, but don't show an id in the url. Even using mod rewrite, how can they be sure to get the right page using just text urls?

leatherback

They use text instead of ID's, like you would use a filename;

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/review-juice/

e.g.,
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/reviews/juice.php

or
http://www.mattcutts.com/index.php?section=blog&type=review&topic=juice

I know even nicer:

www.domain.com/page/subdir/name.php

www.domain.com/index.php?page=page/subdir/name.php

Yari

Ahah, didn't even think of that!

As I don't want to hand-create a .php file for each new page (I'm using a CMS), I could try to find the page name based on the url... very nice.

Thanks Leatherback!

leatherback

Yari wrote:
Ahah, didn't even think of that!

As I don't want to hand-create a .php file for each new page (I'm using a CMS), I could try to find the page name based on the url... very nice.

Thanks Leatherback!

Yeah, that iswhat I am doing. However, you should facilitate for misspelling (As you are now using php to find your pages, you can avoid 404 pages all together:

As I have moved an old website to php, what I do too:

-> First check the passed URI against the URI's in the database
-> No match? Replace .php with .htm and search again
-> No match? Check for files in that folder, and serve a list if less then 10
-> Still no match? Move the header to the search page, and insert the URI with each folder / filename as a search term, and sort by match relevance.

Yari

Yes, very nice.

However I am using a purely database driven site, with no files except the index.php... all the links point back to my index.php file.

I could do a search for a page title if no page is found... or show the top ten pages with the search term.

Thanks again.