e-commerce href management - php

Question

I have a question regarding e-commerce websites. Lets assume there is an e-commerce website that sells products for women, men, kids. For each of these categories it sells clothes, shoes ---etc. When a user clicks on women or men or whatever category, the user should be directed to a page showing the list of products corresponding to that category. Lets assume that the website have the same layout. For example the navbars, the squares where products will be displayed are the same. the only difference is the content it self. My question does large e-commerce websites have a separate html file for each product or they have some a template html file where the design and layout is fixed and based on link clicked the content of html is changed. Having a separate html file would be very cumbersome. If having a template html file is the case, how does the name of the link in browser change when different products are clicked is it related to .htaccess.
Thanks.

Answer 1

Yes .htaccess is important in this case. Try to learn how to parse url, and make some simple MVC applications.

Answer 2

There are many methods to doing this. The main answer to your question is that you need to parse the url. I'll go over a couple here.
1) PHP looks like it would be the easiest solution if you're connecting to a mysql database with products. You can create a php file with the categories as parameters, so each link could look like products.php?category=shoes
Then you can parse that url with $_GET in your code.
$category = $_GET['category'];
Then, in your php file, you can display specific content based on the category like so:
if ($_GET['category'] = 'shoes'){
//then enter your logic here
}
elseif ($_GET['category'] = 'books'){
//then enter your logic here
}
Here's some more info on the PHP GET: http://w3schools.sinsixx.com/php/php_get.asp.htm
You can do this via javascript by parsing the href
function getParameterByName(name, url) {
if (!url) url = window.location.href;
name = name.replace(/[\[\]]/g, "\\$&");
var regex = new RegExp("[?&]" + name + "(=([^&#]*)|&|#|$)"),
results = regex.exec(url);
if (!results) return null;
if (!results[2]) return '';
return decodeURIComponent(results[2].replace(/\+/g, " "));
}
var dynamicContent = getParameterByName('dc');
and then writing the logic to correctly create elements that fit your requirements through javascript.
More details: http://jennamolby.com/how-to-display-dynamic-content-on-a-page-using-url-parameters/
This should help you move forward to understanding how to achieve your concept hopefully!