Covering up ?<get>=$ With any text

[Anim8r]

Hi my name is Aidan and I am new here.

 

Me and my friends are making a Social Network just for fun and to help us learn PHP in a more fun way. We are wanting to know if there is way to cover up the GET in the URL bar.

 

For example when your visiting a user's profile it will say in the URL bar: www.com/profile.php?id=<userid>

I also know that this is what Facebook do for their profile system.

However they also have a feature called 'usernames' which allows you to get facebook.com/<anything>

which replaces facebook.com/profile.php?id=<userid>

 

I was wondering how I would be able to implement this.

 

Many thanks,

Aidan

[phoenixx]

Just have it pull the username associated with the row id in the database.

[Anim8r]

Just have it pull the username associated with the row id in the database.

Could you please provide a code example?

[phoenixx]

Sorry, misunderstood the question.  Try using a custom 404 page and use the following:

 

$userid=explode ("/",$url); // requested URL

echo $userid[1]; // or $userid[3] if using http://www.domain.com/id instead of just www

 

file_get_contents("http://mydomain.com/404.php?id="); //to reflect the output of the requested user

[xyph]

The 'correct' way to do this is using mod_rewrite. This is an Apache directive, but other server will have an equivalent.

 

This is beyond the scope of this forum, but there's plenty out there. Googling it will return TONS of information.

[Anim8r]

Thank you guys. The 404 page thing worked great, FYI if anyone else wants to do something similar heres what I'm using now:

 

<?php
include_once "scripts/connect_to_mysql.php"; ///Connects to DB
$username = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']; /// Gets the username from the URL (incl a forward slash)

$username = ltrim($username, '/'); /// Removes the forward slash

$sql = mysql_query("SELECT id FROM myMembers WHERE username='$username'"); /// Queries the DB, matches the usernames and returns the user's ID

while($row = mysql_fetch_array($sql)){ /// Sets the variable $id from the DB
    $id = $row["id"];
}

$profilelocation = "http://domain.com/profile.php?id=$id"; /// Sets the user's profile link
$page = file_get_contents($profilelocation);
echo $page; /// echos out the final profile page
?>

 

Regards,

Anim8r