Tidy and Modern Web Address question

[gorgo666]

Hello everyone.  I've beenputting off joining phpfreaks for a lonnggg time but here I am, finally! 

 

But anyway.  I have a question that I've been pondering for ages, and it may be a little obvious so please don't ridicule me.

 

Most websites now-a-days seem to have completely removed file names from their addresses and navigation.  To give you an example, a lot of people may have used http://www.acme.com/about.php but now instead you only see http://www.acme.com/about/ which obviously refers to a directory.  It looks much tidier and is really Web 2.0...

 

Can someone elaborate on this?  Is it a behind the scenes CMS doing this, like Drupal or Wordpress?  Or is it simply people storing an index.php file inside that directory?

 

I look forward to any reply!  Cheers guys.

[JasonLewis]

Research mod_rewrite

 

That's what you'll need to be using, and it's not PHP related.

 

And check out this board on this very website, http://www.phpfreaks.com/forums/index.php/board,50.0.html

 

Good luck.

[gorgo666]

Thanks for the very quick reply.  I always thought it was something to do with mod-rewrite.  I thought the default mod-rewrite code that Wordpress gives you does the trick, or Zend Framework, as that seems to remove index.php from the end of the URL...?

 

I always thought that until I just tried making a directory for each section of the site such as "site_root/about" and then inside the about directory, I would create an index.php file and everything worked as planned...

 

Out of interest, how would you go about doing this?

[JasonLewis]

Okay, well you don't need any directories. You just need the normal pages, so about.php, contact.php etc etc.

 

Then enable rewrite_module, which is an Apache Module. This allows you to, of course, use mod_rewrite. Now you need to create a new file and call it .htaccess

 

In this file we will put rules which will make things like www.website.com/about/ actually point to www.website.com/index.php?page=about

 

That's all mod_rewrite does. So the user may think they are in the directory "about" but in fact they are still in the root directory. So, in the .htaccess file put this:

 

RewriteEngine on

RewriteRule ^([^/\.]+)/?$ index.php?page=$1 [L]

 

That's it, that will turn www.website.com/about/ into index.php?page=about

 

So then your index.php page you can include the about.php page. Of course that will only work for 1 directory, you need to add more rules if you want links like www.website.com/about/history/

 

Good luck.

[gorgo666]

Very smart.  I'll have to have a sit and play later with a coffee.  Cheers for that.

 

I'm guessing once you've passed the action through GET with mod_rewrite, a simple case or if statement would work to figure out the user's target URL from the page variable...

[JasonLewis]

Yup, you just retrieve the variable like you normally would. So your navigation would have a link like:

<a href="/about/">About Us</a>

 

Then in the content area of your index.php you would have:

 

$page = $_GET['page']; //$_GET['page'] was set with mod_rewrite

include($page.".php");

 

Or something similar.

[gorgo666]

Thanks for the reply!  Sorry about the double post by the way, was an accident.

 

I've tried this out but it doesn't seem to be working.  I wrote some PHP first to test it, at a very basic level:

 

<?php
/** PHP BOOTSTRAP FILE
	******************
	Provides the include to the relevant URI based on the parameter
**/

if ($_GET['page'])
{
	$page = $_GET['page'];
}
else {
	$page = "home";
}

// If nothing passed, then give the home page
echo($page . ".php");
?>

 

As you can see, if you type http://test.dev/?page=about, the browser echos out "about.php".  If you don't specify anything, "home.php" is echoed.  I also made a .htaccess file in the directory with this index.php file (I'm using Mac so it's ~/Sites/test.dev), and in htaccess I put:

 

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^([^/\.]+)/?$ index.php?page=$1 [L]

 

But instead when I put http://test.dev/about, I simply get a "page cannot be found" error, so I don't think the rewrite is working at all.

 

What have I done wrong?  Have I put the htaccess file in the wrong place?

 

Thanks for your help ProjectFear.

[gorgo666]

Problem solved.  On a Mac 10.5.4 Leopard, you have to update the config file in /etc/apache2/users/fredbloggs.conf to:

<Directory "/Users/fredbloggs/Sites/">
    Options All
    AllowOverride All
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Directory>

 

Hope this helps anyone with a similar issue.