how to modify url

ketanco

Hello,

I have a news portal that displays the entire articles only after the user clicks (more...) link I provide at the end of each first paragraph or the title...

the code to link to the whole article page is like this:

while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($query)) {

echo"<p class='newstitle1'>" . $row['date']."<br/>". $row['title'] . "</p>".

"<p id=newstext1>" . $row['par1'];

$b=$row['id'];

echo"<a href='ai/display_ai_whole.php?id=$b'".">"."(more...)"."</a>" ; }

and

The example url of the whole article page looks like this:

......com/ai/display_ai_whole.php?id=21

I want two things:

1-The url of the whole article should also display keywords for SEO reasons. Say, first 4 words of the title of the article. (title of each article is stored as a separate column for each article by the way). How can I do that?

2-I want the id numbers to be at least 3 digits. So far they are up to two digits only and there is a long way to 100 for each category. So an added zero in the beginning should do it. How can I do that?

Note: I was told on other web forums to use url rewrite but I am still not sure if that is better or modifying the URL like this with php for good. I am assuming using php and making the real url have keywords is better, am I correct?

knowj

You need to approach this from both the php/data output and the apache server/.htaccess

the simplest approach would be (imo)

RewriteEngine ON
RewriteRule ^articles/([0-9]+)/title-of-the-article$ ai/display_ai_whole.php?id=$1

function permalink($value)
	{
		$search = array(
		   '/\s+/' => '_', // changes all white-space characters to hyphens
		   '/\W/' => ''    // remove non-word characters
		);
		$value = strtolower(preg_replace(array_keys($search), $search, $value));
		$value = eregi_replace('__', '_', $value);
		$value = eregi_replace('_', '-', $value);
		return $value;
	}
echo '<a href="/articles/'.$row['id'].permalink($row['title']).'">(more...)</a>'."\n" ;

this way it doesn't involve you having to check that the titles are unique every time an article is added/edited. the added title to the url is technically pointless but gives added SEO value and helps the user when they are looking for a previous page they were on.