learning about http access

numerical25

I just got a job working for a company that had a previous programmer that took advantage of the http access. One of the things he does with it is...

Make it where every page is pulled up in the index page. depending on which page is called, the include will change. So really when you go to the next page, your not leaving the index page, you stay at the index page and the index page is just calling a different include. the coding of the page has a include for the header and an include for the footer. and an include for the body and the body include is the one that changes everytime the user clicks a different page.
He also has it where you cant see the .php extension in the url. He made where he using some type of regular expression to replace the .php with a / (forward slash)

I find it to be a clever idea, however, it eliminates a few things. like passing URL varibles from page to page. Instead he has it where if you want to pass a varible you have to pass it like this

          phpbuilder.com/home/value/

where value is the value itself. to retrieve this value you must use a already set varible called $section which hold the value "value".. The downfall to this is that i can only pass one varible not multiples

My question is...
Is this type of website structuring a good way of building websites ?
if so, is there a better way of structuring so that i can pass more then one varible through the url if needed

Does anyone know why he would do this. And does anyone know of a better way.

But what I would really like to know over all is does anyone know any good books or tutorials that thoroughly go over http access. I would refer a book but any great tutorials will do too. I need to understand it a little bit better. What I mention above may sound confusing to you guys but its confusing to me too, thats why i need to understand it a little more. please, if anyone know any great resources, please give them. thanks

NogDog

It is done with the belief that it will help with search engine rankings, as the links are both more readable, plus links with lots of query string variable=value pairs may tend to be ignored by search engines which may interpret them all as referring to the same page.

bpat1434

The best resource about .htaccess and what you can put in it, and how it works is as always, the manual: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/howto/htaccess.html

Other reasons people may choose to do this is because if you create an application that is rather intricate, and you want to cut down on actual folders, you can route everything through one general index.php file and use some rewriting magic for "pseudo" folders.

A large framework that uses this is the Zend Framework. No particular reason I guess, except it helps keep the layout of the framework "tidy" and unifies how people set their projects up (although it is completely customizable).

I have a project I'm working on in my off time which will take a url like:
http://domain.com/download/package_name/version/archive_type and turn it into something like:
http://domain.com/download.php?package=package_name&version=version&type=archive_type

Notice how "nice" it is? Just nicer. I sometimes prefer layouts like this. In order to keep the "folder" like structure of it, I could create a "download" folder and use the index.php instead to get a url like:
http://domain.com/download/?package=package_name&version=version&type=archive_type

Depends upon what you're going for and what your project calls for. You can use it or not.

Weedpacket

numerical25 wrote:
2. He also has it where you cant see the .php extension in the url. He made where he using some type of regular expression to replace the .php with a / (forward slash)

Good design. The rest of the world doesn't care what you use to run your site or how it works. Why should they need to?

Have a look at http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI (notice how the URL there is written, feel depressed that the essay was written ten years ago, but then notice that the URL is still live).