Friendly URLS

[Inf51]

I'm developing a website where users have their own sections within the site so for example if someone visits /users/index.php?uid=100 then they see the content for user ID 100 (Mark) and the user ID is stored in a session variable so as they browse various pages each page only displays the database content for Mark.

It all works fine but I'd like to use a friendlier URL so users can use the URL /users/mark instead of /users/index.php?uid=100 (I realise that the user names will need to be unique!)

I've played around with .htaccess and rewriting the URLs and tried this:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteBase /users

RewriteRule  (.*)  index.php\?sef=$1

Index.php then uses $sef to lookup the user's ID.

I've found two problems with this though - firstly it messes up all the paths to my CSS and javascript and secondly sub pages in the site don't work. I think my RewriteRule is the problem as it's sending all requests through index.php.

Does anyone have any tips on using friendly URLs with PHP? Do I need more specific rules in .htaccess or do I need index.php to be more intelligent with how it handles the URLS?

[dagon]

you should exclude the css,js, images from the rewrite either by directory of file extension. here something form one of my sites

# make sure all images, javascript and styles are delivered as is
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/manager/(themes|images|js|fckeditor)/.*
# redirect all other traffic to the index page
RewriteRule ^.*$ index.php [L]

[Inf51]

Thanks Dagon!

That's fixed my CSS problem.

I think I was also over complicating things by having my PHP handling the URLs in places where a rewrite rule was easier so now instead of having all requests go through index.php I have more rules that redirect to different PHP pages which seems to work better for me. 🙂