Help with User ID Site

[dkeeper09]

Not sure how to correctly create subject for this. Here is my situation:

 

I am creating an affiiate website for the company I work for. They want an affiliate to be able to sign up on their website, and based on the username that the affiliate gives us, auto-create an affiliate site on our site. So for example, if I signed up with the username bob, our site needs to be replicated at the url www.domain.com/bob

 

My initial reaction for this was to have the site just duplicate itself in a folder based on that username. However, I was later told that we are expecting thousands of people to sign up for this....meaning replicating the site each time isn't exactly ideal.

 

I know there is a way to basically create a url www.domain.cin/index.php?username=bob and have that show up to someone as www.domain.com/bob

 

I was told something about using .htaccess to manage this, but I have no idea where to begin or how to start with this. I currently have the affiliate username being written to a mysql database, so that isnt an issue if I need to store the variable. Any help on this is greatly appreciated. I hope I explained this well enough.

 

 

Thank you.

[.josh]

google "beautify url" lots of tuts on how to do exactly this.

[requinix]

Reconsider your URLs for a second. What if people sign up with names like "admin" or "cpanel" or "images"? How about putting the usernames at the second level like /user/bob?