e-commerce site structure - handling URL's question

kbc1

Hi all

I will try to keep this very brief.

I have built many e-commerce websites over the years and most of the URL's to product detail landing pages would be structured as follows (I have used cars as an example below):

mydomain.com/shop/nissan/qashqai/

Now I normally redirect all my HTTP requests through to the index.php script using .htaccess rewrite rules and I then take the first part of the URL (e.g: /shop/) to pull up my shop.php script and the last part of the URL (e.g: /qashqai/) and look for a record in my product database that matches that URL and display the product details accordingly in the shop.php script to the user.

Now I am looking to change this format so when a user clicks to view the product details, the URL will be:

mydomain.com/qashqai/

As you can see there is no "category" and no "shop" and the URL count is only 1 part.

I was wondering how it would be possible to know if the user is requesting to view a Product or simply requesting to look at a dynamic page of text such as:

mydomain.com/dynamic-text-page

because I have no "shop" prefix in my URL to work from, what would be the best method to achieve my goal?

I hope I have explained my question clearly.

Thanks
kbc

Bunkermaster

More of an apache kind of question. You have provided the answer in your post though. If it ends with / (mimicking a directory) it's a rewrite on shop. if not, it's a direct access.
Now in terms of SEO (pre-penguin release but most likely still valid) you lose information in the URL that could have some value for you.

bradgrafelman

Bunkermaster;11008803 wrote:
Now in terms of SEO (pre-penguin release but most likely still valid)

Probably not. In the long list of "Things that Optimize SEO", prettifying your URLs should be near (if not at) the bottom of the list.

For example, to me there's nothing wrong with "/shop.php?make=honda&model=prelude" vs. "/cars/honda/prelude/". What's more important is that the page served up by either URL contains good information about Honda Prelude vehicles (and who else knows the page contains this information and links to it).

kbc1

Sorry bunkmaster - that was a typo - my URLs do not have a forward slash at the end in any situation.

I have come up with a solution though. I will store the "type" of record in the database and when I capture the URL (upon a page being served) I will find the record in my database which matches the last part of the URL, obtain the "type" of record it is (e.g. Product, Category, Text Page etc) and then server up the correct script that way.

My only concern with having the the final URL for products as such:

mydomain.com/qashqai

Is that what happens if I have mutiple records in my database that have that same URL! I guess I would have to prevent a URL being used more than once maybe?

Bunkermaster

Or you could have a keyword table referencing different type of artefacts (car, maker, country, etc) and your rewriting would be based on checking which type of artefact the keyword requested points to and handle the display accordingly. If you see what I mean.

cahva

I have created a couple of eCommerce apps also myself. The product with same name will become a problem for sure at some point. I add product id in the url as well as slug. eg. site.com/shop/nissan/show_pr/12/qashqai. The slug is only there for search engines, nothing more. Category name is also not needed(in my shop product is one-to-many relation with categories so it can belong to n+1 categories) for the final productpage. At first I also traversed through the url to find the final product but it was a biatch to maintain. One thing that I added recently was that client can create the slug themselves(so shop will first look for the custom slug and dont have to use show_pr/{product_id} at all) but it must be unique for obvious reasons..