mod_rewrite for seo

[developerdave]

Morning guys,

 

I'm gonna straight away put my hands in the air and say I'm bit of a mod_rewrite newbie with only the basics and I'm looking for a head start on how to rewrite this ugly url to a friendly url

 

So for example

 

http://mywebsite.co.uk/item.php?id=100

 

rewritten to

 

http://mywebsite.co.uk/item/projector/

 

I know it can be done so I won't ask that, but from what I've seen (all the $1, $2 business) it doesn't make a whole amount of sense to me, could someone shed some light on this for me as its a skill I'd love to learn.

[GalaxyTramp]

Hi Dave

 

RewriteEngine On

RewriteRule ^projector/$ /item.php?id=100 [L]

 

Will output in the browser address bar as: http://mywebsite.co.uk/projector/

 

 

So basically if a page starts with ^projector rewrite it to /item etc. The $ sign denotes the end of the string to be matched and [L] tells Apache to stop here if rewrite conditions are met.

 

So links on your site to http://mywebsite.co.uk/projector/ would be rewritten on the server to http://mywebsite.co.uk/item.php?id=100

You can find several online tools to achieve this such as http://www.generateit.net/mod-rewrite/

 

No point in reinventing the wheel so google mod rewrite and you will find plenty of tutorials explaining the intracacies of this method.

 

GT

[AdRock]

RewriteRule ^/?item/([a-zA-Z)$ item.php?id=$1 [NC,L]

[developerdave]

Thanks guys, I did do some Google'ing but as I say 99% of the examples are pretty confusing considering I only know the basic (.*) method lol. I'll test these out in a bit, I have to install a SSL cert now lol T.T

[developerdave]

Thanks guys, I did some thinking and it turns out I could have done it a lot simpler and done it a much easier way round.

 

I've decided to use friendly urls and rewrite them to request the ugly one in the background (no redirect)

 

So the url will read

 

www.example.com/projector/100

 

And the mod_rewrite something along the lines of

 

/(.*)/(.*)/ item.php?id=$2

 

Which is much simpler lol, thanks for your help guys 

[developerdave]

Hey guys, apparently that didn't want to work and I'm stumped with all this mod_rewrite malarky.

 

I've tried using AdRock's example, modified slightly to

RewriteRule ^/?item/([a-zA-Z)/([a-zA-Z)$ item.php?id=$2 [NC,L]

which I was convinced would have worked lol.

 

Can anyone help please?

[cags]

What URL are you trying to accept as an input and what URL should Apache actually be serving up? I'm guessing you need a forward slash before item.php you don't need the /? at the start of the first pattern you possibly need something like that at the end of that pattern, it depends exactly what URLs you are trying to match.

[developerdave]

I've been trying something like this

 

^/(.*)/(.*)$ /item.php?id=$1

 

But to no avail

 

I'm trying to rewrite something like this

 

www.example.com/macbook-pro/5 to serve item.php?id=5

[cags]

I'm not sure why you were convinced your previous pattern would work then since the first 'directory' includes a dash which you didn't allow and the second is a number which you also didn't allow. You also had no quantifier meaning you were only matching a single character. You pattern wants to be something along the lines of the following...

 

RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z-]+)/([0-9]+)/?$ /item.php?id=$2 [NC,L]