General question about websites and how they mange links vs. directories, etc.

[thepip3r]

As an example:  www.php.net/date

 

For sites that have links like this, where you type in something after the domain and it comes up with what you're looking for (ie, the date function), this can't be just a directory with something like an index.php file at the root of the php site is it?  That would make hundreds of small directories at your root and make it very cumbersome to manage.  So, my question is... how do they do this?  How do they take something that the website typically answers for and make open a separate page??

 

TIA

[phpzone]

Apache rewrite, and/or manually coding using the $_SERVER['PATH_INFO'] server environment variable.

 

CodeIgniter and other frameworks use this method.