Startup page for a php db site

fayek

Hi there.

When a user types in www.sitename.com, I want to be able to call a dynamic php page (not index.html). What is the easiest way to do this? I am not particularly fond of creating a re-direct page.

Thanks in advance..

edwardsbc

Well, this all depends on which web server you are using. But in any case you need to tell the web server to look for other "index" pages, like index.php. Let us know your web server and we can direct you to the specific place to make this setting.

fayek

Server is Apache running Red Hat Linux 6.2 Also, will changing the startup page from index.html to index.php3 affect search engines being able to index my site?

fayek

I am running Apache on Red Hat Linux..

Also, will changing my start up page to index.php instead of index.html change the ability of search engines to index my site?

edwardsbc

In your httpd.conf file, find the section called DirectoryIndex and add your favorite php index file name to the list of files that will be considered "indexes" (loaded if no file is provided in the URL). You do not have to remove the others and they will still work. Order, however, becomes important if more than one of these files is available (say index.php and index.html).

Some search engines will work, some won't, but I'm not an expert on this topic. I do know some search engines won't follow dynamic links (x.php?var=value etc.) There is an older article here on PHPBuilder on how to trick search engines into indexing a dynamic site: <http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/tim19990117.php3>
and
<http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/tim20000526.php3>

edraynham

Or....
If you just want to change to index page for that directory then you can create a plain text file called .htaccess containing the following text:

DirectoryIndex your_index

Then upload it to your webserver in the directory to want to change.