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[jaymc]

I have a profile page that knows which user to grab data for via the GET

 

www.site.com/p.php?user=fred

 

What I want is to use this approach

 

www.site.com/fred

 

In this case surely I would have to have a directory called fred and some kind of code in there to pick up that where looking for fred..

 

However, I know sites that use this method and Im pretty sure they dont have 300,000 member directories

 

Is there a way around it? I have full control over appache by the way

 

maybe a virtual host with the servername of profile.site.com?user=

 

Not sure how I can do this, feedback would be great

[ki]

edit your .htaccess file and use the following:

 

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^([^/\.]+)/?$ p.php?user=$1 [L]

 

[jaymc]

THANKS !!!!!

[jaymc]

What about

 

membername.site.com

 

Again that would usually require a Vhost. anyway to do it via htaccess

 

Cheers

[Sorthy359]

verbally when you say it out loud it sounds smoother to say site.com/fred .. also, when someone mispells a real directory name, it might say "user not found" instead of page not found. keep that in mind ..i  would personally put "page not found"

[ki]

good point sorthy

thats why I did that with my 404.shtml page

so you get an error like "wrong id"

[jaymc]

Anyway to go with membername.site.com rather than site.com/membername

[jaymc]

edit your .htaccess file and use the following:

 

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^([^/\.]+)/?$ p.php?user=$1 [L]

 

That works, but, any other link I go to on my page directs to p.php

 

For instance I have www.site.com/messages

 

Its taking them to p.php and treating it as this URL www.site.com/p.php?user=messages

 

How did I get around that?

[Jessica]

You probably want to do http://site.com/users/username/ so that you won't loose all your other pages.

[jaymc]

dam, is there any other way at all?

[Jessica]

What if you have a user who signs up as "messages". How do you tell which messages page you want, their profile or the messages page? Make the users have a distinct type of url, it will be easier.

[jaymc]

I dont want to have www.site.com/users/username

 

I want to just have www.site.com/username

 

But, if I have a script inside of a folder called files, it thinks www.site.com/files is a username called files

 

I dont think its going to be possible, however, im sure faceparty do it!

 

Anyway, how about www.membername.site.com instead, how can that be achieved through rewrite rule?

[Jessica]

don't use www

 

Do you know see the issue that I brought up?

I mean, what if you have a user called files? How do you know which they want to get to.

You can do site.com/username if you make sure all of your other urls are within another directory. But otherwise there is no way to tell what is what.

[jaymc]

Its better to have members.site.com static pointing to www.site.com/users

 

Then I can have

 

members.jaydiocity.co.uk/username

 

Smarter

 

Cheers for help!

[jaymc]

Hey Ive ran into a new problem

 

members.site.co.uk/username works fine

 

However, some of my members names have weird characters in them, even something as simple as a fullstop is causing a problem

 

members.site.co.uk/.my.name.

 

I get page cannot be displayed

 

Any ideas?!

[jaymc]

Also, my new way of using a subdomain as members.site.com/username

 

How about the original way site.com/username, but, have something that looks to see if thats an actual directory first... or if that member exists or not

 

Just wondering how to go about that...

 

How do myspace do it? because they have directories in there top level...

 

 

[sljaxon]

I highly recommend reading this tutorial on mod_rewrite: http://www.easymodrewrite.com.

 

For example, you can do exactly what you want to do with this htaccess code:

RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule (.*) p.php?user=$1 [QSA,L]

 

This essentially tells Apache and mod_rewrite to first look if the file exists. If it does not, run it through p.php.