Dynamic urls, how?

[Bikkebakke]

Hi freaks! It's been a while since I last asked for help 

 

I'm done with my first learning project and decided to start a new one with proper planning etc.

I want to use dynamic urls but I was unable to find a good tutorial so I decided to ask here, so;

 

Does anyone know a good tutorial which I could learn from or could someone give me a brief explanation on how to create such a system?

 

The idea is to make a page with header, footer, menu and a (content) frame/div where I include() the page.

 

 

Thanks in advance,

Bikkebakke

 

[dooper3]

Well assuming you're just wanting the one level of dynamic-ness (e.g. domain.com/page1, domain.com/page2 etc. not domain.com/page1/page2) you could use a .htaccess file and some simple PHP with a directory for the included files like so:

 

.htaccess

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule . index.php [L]

 

index.php

//header goes here
include('/pages/'.str_replace('/', '', $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']).'.php');
//footer goes here

 

Then you have a director called pages which has a file for each page (page1.php, page2.php etc). Easy. The htaccess sends all requests to the index.php file, which has the header and footer, and in between it includes the file from the pages directory that matches the bit of the url after the domain (minus the slash).

 

Also, if you wanted it to do a 404 message for pages that weren't in the pages directory, you could adapt index.php to look like this:

 

//header goes here
$page = '/pages/'.str_replace('/', '', $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']).'.php';
if (file_exists($page))
  include($page);
else
  print '<h1>Page not found</h1><p>The page you were looking for could not be found</p>';
//footer goes here

[Bikkebakke]

Thanks for that, dooper3.

 

Theres no .htaccess file on the server (forced to show hidden files too) so I'd assume I have to make one, is there anything else I need to include in the file than just the lines you quoted?

 

Like, are the following lines required?

AuthType
AuthName
AuthUserFile
Require

 

[Bikkebakke]

Okay I got it working, except, what format should the file follow at the pages-directory?

 

I.e.

<a href="?id=1">Home</a>

What does the "?id=1" refer to in the ./pages/ and how do I define it?

[Bikkebakke]

Got it working, a thousand thanks.