I was reading a little about .htaccess file and I found that it's possible to change .php in the url to .html
But I do not understand what the point of doing it is or what it tries to achieve.
Please note that i'm a beginner with .htaccess also I've searched for that on Google but I didn't found what i'm looking for
There is an ever ongoing battle between seo friendly url's and not. It all depends on the very purpose of your site. If for an example you have a script with dynamic pages like search script or generator of some type (very broad , right ? ;) ) then if your url looks like this:
domain.tld/products?id=183
Rather than
domain.tld/products|183.html
then I don't think there is any better than .php, it's still dynamic and SE will discover that but if you have blog then you might consider a proper wording in url instead of id's. I can think of only one reason apart from what SE' see. What your viewer/surfer sees. I think if he quickly glance at domain.tld/date/rather-simple-title then he might be more interested than in id=183. Now if the url has extension domain.tld/date/rather-simple-title.php or domain.tld/date/rather-simple-title.html in my humble opinion there's no impact on either SE or your website visitor.
Pure theory and rather opinion based conversation here, like the question.
Related
I'm not asking for a whole engine of code. I'm working on a blog/magazine website. Here are the 2 styles of paginations. I see people use these types of addresses:
example.com/browse?page=100
example.com/page/100/
I understand 1.'s. But, 2. doesn't give me an impression of php usage in the address.
I did a search on Google, but there are only helps on 1. How do you manage 2.? Because whenever you write a new article, you have to push the content throughout every html? Did they use "fake addresses"? because I tried example.com/page/100/index.html and there is no such website.
Can anyone point me to a webpage or explain to me how did they manage 2. style of pagination? Which has a better UX?
Sorry if this is a bad title. Please help me edit and ask me if anywhere isn't clear.
It's URL Rewriting that is responsible or translating nice-looking Urls to their 'real' path on the server.
In your case,
www.example.com/page/100/
might be rewritten on the server to something like
www.example.com/browse.php?page=100
More info:
mod_rewrite for Apache
Url Rewrite for IIS
I am a beginner PHP programmer. I searched google for a "Dynamic PHP website tutorials". I found some stuff. They use $_GET variable to make the website dynamic, so the URL's appear like this:
example.com/?page=home
example.com/?page=about
example.com/?page=Downloads
and so on...
But most of the dynamic websites that I found on the internet has links like this:
example.com
example.com/about
example.com/download and so on....
So how do they do so ?? Have they got folders for all the catogories ?? And Also some websites have article URLs (eg : example.com/articles/posts/2010/article1.php). It would be a reall mess if they've got folders for all items. If not then How ?? Can someone give an example please ?
If you're using apache then read: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_rewrite.html
If you're using IIS then read: http://www.iis.net/downloads/microsoft/url-rewrite
In order to use the $_GET variable, it must be in the query string (or being routed through some other means that isn't 'default').
For example, the URLs you're using would become.
example.com/?page=home
example.com/?page=about
example.com/?page=Downloads
Additionally, you can rewrite URLs using the .htaccess file (http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/misc/rewriteguide.html)
You are interested in page routing.
htaccess and MVC routing may start you down the correct path :)
To echo everyone else, it's called a url rewite.
For example, the url
http://example.com/index.php?ext=blog&cat=news&date=12122012
can be rewritten as
http://example.com/blog/news/12-12-2012
This isn't automatic, it requires defining the patterns used for understanding the new URL in a file called .htaccess which usually resides in the servers root directory. Note that the preceding '.' in the filename makes it a hidden file.
When I was first getting used to PHP i found the site http://phpbuilder.com a great help. They have a lot of articles, and a forum that is fairly nice to noobies. http://devshed.com is a good site too, and has a large amount of information on subjects outside of PHP.
You can achieve that affect with folders, but most use rewrites (Apache). It's a bit too broad of a subject to go in to here, but if you just search for rewrite tutorials you'll find some pretty quickly.
The $_GET is only to get variables from the URL. While this can be used to make sites dynamic, this is a technique which is usually frowned upon.
With rewrites, you basically have a URL like /about, but the rewrite tells your server something like "act like this is actually ?page="about"), which you then use the $_GET to process.
Being PHP beginner I will not urge you to use .htaccess, As you will need to learn lot many things before you proceed further. You have 2 option to send a request one is GET and POST. You can get more information about same on internet.
Also you have an option to start your dynamic website using CMS and I will recommend you to use wordpress. CMS will have some in-built function which will help you to do your work faster. Also using their control panel you can update the URL format.
I will also urge you to go step by step and follow every tutorial that you will find on internet.
All the best
If you want to do this you have to use .htaccess file and have to load mod_rewrite in your apache server.
In you root directory create file named .htaccess
Then Write:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.php$ index.php?page=$1 [L,QSA]
And After that call a page
my-page.php
It will redirected as a index.php?page=my-page internally but in browser it will show as my-page.php
I am struggling to find this as I'm not sure exactly what I'm looking for!
I've seen that some sites seem to use 'subfolders' as links to pages, e.g. wikipedia.
E.g. Let's say I had a record in a database with a unique title "My Shopping List". I want to be able to navigate to www.mySite.com/my_shopping_list and have it automatically 'forward' to a page showing the relevant record.
I am using IIS and wondering if there's a way I can do it with that, but I may be looking in the wrong place.
This is for a knowledgebase where I might write an article called "how to use a computer" and would like to be able to create a 'friendly' link for users (http://www.mySite.com/how_to_use_a_computer rather than http://www.mySite.com/article.php?ID=123. I will need to be able to create these 'links' dynamically using the title field.
Thank you
EDIT: I am using IIS6
You should use URL Rewrite, the microsoft ressource for this technique is here: http://www.iis.net/download/urlrewrite
In the iss forum the issue about url rewrite in iss < 7 is discussed with some suggestions on software to use.
I don't know which one is best, maybe there are others who know:
http://iirf.codeplex.com/
http://www.isapirewrite.com/
http://urlrewriter.net/
With PHP, you'll need to code URLConf using something like a htaccess file or the manager GUI. You can read ISS docs on URL rewrite to learn how., but as I understand, this is a module you'll have to download separately.
This question also shows how do do it without editing server configuration files or htaccess, but you'll be stuck with a http://example.com/index.php/path/to/view format (where index.php is a real script with the URLConf in it.)
Well some time ago it was used to call 'Friendly URL' or 'FURL', now i see that it's ust Rewrite URL. Look for tutorials for beginners.
What method can you recommended for creating search engine-friendly URLs? When coding in PHP that is. Ideally I would like something like:
http://www.example.com/article/523544
So it doesn't display the file it's opening (eg article.php)
It is quite necessary to generate a SEO friendly URL's so that most of the Search engines can easily index it.And the most interesting part with it that URL can easily correlate to the Page Content and the User can generate a Pretty URL as per the keywords he want to rank the page on different Search Engines(e.g. google.com,google.co.in,bing.com)
The best example to have Pretty Links is on Wordpress.It actually stores the Dynamic Page URL's in the Database itself.And when the Pretty Ur is being called,internally the htaccess is called and it redirects to the original dynamic page in the system.
Some basic tips from
Google
SEOmoz
may help you.
Some topics in SO:
mod_rewrite
nice url
Edit:
You need to place a .htaccess file in your document root that includes the following rules:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^article/([0-9]+)?$ article.php?id=$1 [L]
Make sure mod_rewrite enabled in Apache and you are allowed to use it.
If you read some questions in SO in this topic it will help you understand how mod_rewrite works.
To make your urls more search engine friendly you may want to use 'slugs' so you need to sanitize your article titles like in this url.
Ideally your URL needs to contain something about the topic of the URL. You gave the example of http://www.example.com/article/523544, where this is better than using standard query strings, it's still not ideal, as all that any search engine can see from it is that it's an article.
It's important to remember that the segment (a segment is the string between each slash) closest to the domain is the most important:
http://www.example.com/most-important/next-important/less-important/
I personally always try to use the following URL structure, and keep my page/article titles unique:
http://www.example.com/this-wonderful-article
Notice the use of dashes and not underscores, this is generally known as the preferred method. Using this method I usually generate and save the article's slug ('this-wonderful-article') in the database, and then search for that instead of an ID.
Appreciated that sometimes it's very difficult to just use slug, especially with a larger website. You may have multiple articles with the same title, or the website may have user-submitted content over which you have no control. If this is the case, you can use the ID without any worries, but just be sure to include the title of the article in the URL. Eg: http://www.example.com/this-wonderful-article/29587
If you're looking for a method of using these URLs then I'd suggest looking at some mod_rewrite tutorials. Personally I use a framework that does the majority of the legwork for me such as CodeIgniter (http://www.codeigniter.com), or you could use something like the Zend Framework or CakePHP. If you're only doing articles then it might be worth looking into a sturdy CMS like WordPress, although this depends largely on your requirements.
I have posted a similar question here. However, this was more about getting advice on what to do. Now that I know what to do, I am looking for a little help on how to do it!
Basically I have a website that is pretty much 100% dynamic. All the website links are generated using PHP and all the pages are made up of php includes/code. I am trying to improve the SEO of the site by improving the URLs (as stated in the other question) and I am struggling a little.
I am using mod_rewrite of rewriting the nice urls to the ugly urls on the server. So what I need is to now convert the ugly urls (which are generated from the php code in the pages) to the nicer urls.
Here are the URLs I need to parse (these are in the other question aswell):
/index.php?m=ModuleType
/index.php?m=ModuleType&categoryID=id
/index.php?m=ModuleType&categoryID=id&productID=id
/index.php?page=PageType
/index.php?page=PageType&detail=yes
Here is what I want the above URLs to be parsed to:
/ModuleType
/ModuleType/CategoryName
/ModuleType/CategoryName/ProductName
/PageType
/PageType/Detail
There is an example on the other question posted by Gumbo however I felt it was a bit messy and unclear on exactly what it was doing.
Could someone help me solve this problem?
Thanks in advance.
I think I see what you're after... You've done all the URL rewriting, but all the links between your pages are using the old URL syntax.
The only way I can see around this is to do some kind of regex search and replace on the links so they use the new syntax. This will be a bit more complicated if all the links are dynamically generated, but hopefully there won't be too much of this to do.
Without seeing how your links are generated at the moment, it's difficult to say how to change the code. I imagine it works something like this though:
<?php echo "<a href='/index.php?m=$ModuleType&categoryID=$id'>"; ?>
So you'd change this to:
<?php echo "<a href='$ModuleType/$id'>"; ?>
Sorry if I've made errors in the syntax, just off the top of my head...
Unless I misunderstood your question, you don't parse the "ugly" URLs, your PHP script is called with them, so you $_GET[] your parameters (m, categoryID, productID) and you combine them to make your nice URLs, which shouldn't be too hard (just a bit of logic to see if one parameter is there and concatenate the strings).
You will need a front controller, which will dispatch the URL to the correct page.
Apache will rewrite the URL using rules in .htaccess, so that anything written will be redirected to index.php?q=. For example, typing http://example.com/i/am/here will result in a call to index.php?q=/i/am/here
Index.php will parse the path from $_GET["q"] and decide what to do. For example, it may include a page, or go to the database, look the path up, get the appropriate content and print it out
If you want a working example of a .htaccess which will do exactly that (redirect to index.php with ?q=path) take a look at how drupal does it:
http://cvs.drupal.org/viewvc.py/drupal/drupal/.htaccess?revision=1.104
As Palantir wrote this is done using mod_rewrite and .htaccess. To get the correct rewrite conditions into your .htaccess you might want to take a look at a Mod Rewrite Generator (e.g. http://www.generateit.net/mod-rewrite/). Makes it a lot easier.