[RESOLVED] SEO Friendly URLs with .htaccess and PHP

TenaciousC

I may be posting this in the wrong place, and if so, I apologize.

I am currently trying to set up "clean" urls for my php pages that have query strings using mod_rewrite. This is something I see quite often, yet for the life of me, cannot get to work.

I have a URL that is

www.mysite.com/products.php?productID=1

I want it to look like

www.mysite.com/products/1

So I googled some stuff and came up with a plethora of sites telling me how to do it. What I eventually settled on was the following Rewrite Rule.

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

Now if I am not mistaken, when I go to my products page, all URLs and links should be cleaned up. Instead they still look like the same lame URLs (and they're mocking me).

Am I merely confused about this whole thing, or am I doing something wrong? Shouldn't I see "www.mysite.com/products/1" in my HTML links? If someone could point me in the right direction, it would be much appreciated.

Oh, and FYI, yes I am certain mod_rewrite is installed, and yes I have tried to read the apache manual.

rsmith

RewriteRules don't clean up your URL's for you. You still have to put the URL in the way you want.

TenaciousC

I see. So how then do I go about doing something like that? Would I just have the database output a url like http://www.mysite.com/products/1/ ?

jazz_snob

I'm gonna offer this suggestion because its worked really well for me:

apache mod_rewrite is awesome however if you start having lots of different "cases" it can be a bear to work with and its not something I really want to maintain and I have noticed subtle different behaviours in different environments...when you move the project from development to production you don't want those kinds of problems!

having apache rewrite everything to a single php page (a front-controller pattern!) has enormous benefit...I think drupal does that, and their .htaccess is the basis for my own work...just send me the URL to index.php and I'll let my php logic figure out what needs to be done!

/Laptops/Dell/Latitude.php becomes index.php?q=Laptops/Dell/Latitude.php

I'll let you figure out how to do the htacess (download drupal if you're stuck)

rsmith

Tenacious - Yes you are right about that. You need your database to output the url. All the rewrite rule does is take the url and match it against a rule. If it matches it knows to interpret the URL /products/1 as viewproducts.php?productid=1