Have tried all night to rewrite my URL!

[Jeffro]

Hi all. 

okay..  so I've failed miserably at rewriting my url.  Here's the story.. 

 

My site currently displays like this (when clicking on a listing from my home page):

hxxp://mysite.com/viewItem.php?id=10

I would LOVE for the urls to read:

 

hxxp://mysite.com/121/border-collie-for-sale-to-good-home  
where 121 is always the $row['postId']; and "border-collie-for-sale-to-good-home" is always my $row['title'];

 

Question 1: 

I did figure out how to make it work this way (solely through my php code):

hxxp://www.mysite.info/viewItem.php?id=121/border-collie-for-sale-to-good-home

-- If I just keep it like this, do you think the SEO benefit is the same as if the viewItem.php?id=121 wasn't there... since the title is appended to the end?

 

Question 2:  Any idea why I can't seem to make the url rewrite?  I would gladly list all the ways I've tried had I recorded them, but I have spent the last 3 hours making changes that do nothing.  It always shows the same (as I show in the first bit of code above).  I've read about 10 different tuts, including this last one (http://www.easymodrewrite.com/guide-syntax), which seems to be setup the same way as my page, so I was hopeful...  but nothing.  I did throw some garbled characters in the .htaccess file to verify it was being recognized. 

 

Thanks for any assistance!

[Jeffro]

By the way.. if anyone is interested in making this work, I'll gladly pay $50 and setup an isolated environment for you to login to.  This is a simple classified script that I did not create but there's not much to it. 

 

Let me know if you have any interest.  I'll pay w/ PayPal immediately following. 

 

Thanks!

[Jeffro]

This is my most recent attempt:

 

ErrorDocument 404 /index.php

RewriteEngine on
# RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^viewItem/([0-9]+)$ viewItem.php?id=$1

 

...and then I called my url to:   

<a href="viewItem.php?id=<?php echo $postid;?>/<?php echo $thetitle;?>"

($postid and $thetitle are both populated with the database results for their respective columns.)

Is this my problem?  If I rewrite the url in htaccess and then call it like this, am I doing it wrong? 

[cags]

OK, so we have a page on our site that works, it's a post with the id of 121 and is accessed via the URL http://mysite.com/viewItem.php?id=121, this is all fine and dandy but it's not as pretty as we would like to be, we want people to access it via http://mysite.com/121/border-collie-for-sale-to-good-home.

 

Step 1: We need to use mod_rewrite in order to take a request for /121/border-collie-for-sale-to-good-home and serve up /viewItem.php?id=121.

 

RewriteEngine On

RewriteRule ^([0-9]+)/[a-z-]+/?$ /viewItem.php?id=$1 [L]

 

We should now be able to type /121/border-collie-for-sale-to-good-home into our address bar, and view the page.

 

Step 2: We need to update the links in our script so that they link to this newly beautified url.

 

<a href="/<?php echo $postid;?>/<?php echo $thetitle;?>"

 

Step 3: Celebrate.

 

There are various nuances that can trip you up along the way, but this is essentially all the steps required.

 

[Jeffro]

cags..  I love you.  I tried everything and your solution did it!  THANK YOU!! 

 

I didn't realize you had provided the solution and was checking back tonight after being away a while.  I gave it a whirl and voila!! 

 

You're my hero dude.  Thx again!

[cags]

I'm glad it worked