Search Engine Friendly URLs

[.Darkman]

Hello Everybody,

 

I am developing a Blog system. I am doing it for two reasons :

1) To Learn more about PHP

2) Wordpress and other systems are too sophisticated for me.

 

I need some help in getting Search Engine friendly URLs.

 

For eg, I have a Post's title as "A New Post".

That is entered into one field of the DB.

 

I want to insert into another field as "a-new-post" so that i can use it in URLs.

 

Could anyone advice me how to do it ?

Also what can be done if the Title contains some special characters.

 

Please do explain in detail. I am Newbie.

 

 

Thanks,

[nloding]

Actually, I'm interested to hear the answer to this.  I am unsure of the best way myself!

[monk.e.boy]

This is pretty simple with .htaccess rewrite rules.

 

Apache will look at the URL and then translate it for you, your .htaccess file will look like:

 

 

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on

RewriteRule ^blog/(.*).html /index.php\?val=$1 [nc]

 

So what this does is when someone browses:

 

http://www.site.com/blog/my-first-blog.html

 

Apache translates this and calls:

 

http://www.site.com/index.php?val=my-first-blog

 

So then in index.php you can do:

 

<?php

echo $_GET['val'];

?>

 

and you get 'my-first-blog', so then you can do:

 

SELECT * FROM my_blog WHERE title LIKE '$_GET['val']'

 

WARNING - SQL injection error in the above code (use mysql_escape_thingy() )

 

Now search google and post some more comments in this thread!!!

 

http://www.google.co.uk/search?num=100&hl=en&q=.htaccess+rewrite+pretty&btnG=Search&meta=

 

monk.e.boy

[monk.e.boy]

ooops

[.Darkman]

Hi monk.e.boy

 

Yeah, i know this.

What i wanted is that My Post's title will be "My Blog Post".

It will be saved in a field called "title"

 

I have another field "sef_title"

 

I want "my-blog-post" to be stored in "sef_title".

 

How do i do this ?

[monk.e.boy]

<?php
$str = "Mary Had A Little Lamb and She LOVED It So";
$str = strtolower($str);
echo $str;

echo str_ireplace(" ", "-", $str);

?>

 

 

hows that?

 

monk.e.boy

[.Darkman]

Hi,

 

Thanks. That was cool.

I think it should be str_replace and not str_ireplace

 

And,

Is there anyway by which i can replace all characters (except Alphabets and numbers) with "-"

 

 

Thanks,

[bwochinski]

<?php
$title = preg_replace("/[^\w]+/","-",$str);
?>

[.Darkman]

Wow !

That was excellent.

 

 

thanks,

[.Darkman]

<?php
$title = preg_replace("/[^\w]+/","-",$str);
?>

What does that do actually ?

Replace all Non-Alpha Numerics Characters ?

Does ^\w stand for those characters ?

 

 

Thanks,