Serve content from a different domain without changing the URL - php

Is there a way to show content on a website from a different domain, without changing the URL. Considering I own and control both Domains and FTPs.
Example:
second-site.com/about, without changing its URL, will show content from first-site.com/about. It gets even trickier, the about page will have the equivalent of URL in another language. So /about may be /uber-uns (in German), and I have to know this somehow so the URL can point to the specific content.
The reason the client wants this setup is because he's running a multi-lang website offering travel packages. He has a ton of prices for hotels and airlines which are the same for both languages, so naturally, he wants to enter them once (contradicting my initial proposal to have two separate CMS's).
Is there anyway to achieve this via htaccess? I'm using ExpressionEngine which is based on CodeIgniter/PHP.
I've researched on Stack and Online, but haven't found a safe or standard way to achieve this.

Related

how to redirect all subsite urls to one single url in a multi-site and also send a variable/value to this sub-site

I have a specific requirement and am looking for suggestions on the best possible way to achieve that. I would start by apologizing if I sound too naïve. What I am trying to achieve in here is:
A) I have a parent site, say, www.abc.com.
B) I am planning to enable multisite option for it. This parent site has a area map with a number of location images overlayed. All of these images, when clicked, should lead to a subsite.
C) This subsite (has already been coded) is totally dynamic and every single information being displayed on it is being extracted from the database. It uses a session variable, which for now has been hard-coded at the very beginning of the header. This variable also decides on which database to refer to. So it will display information for different locations, based on the location selected on the parent site. Even the URL should appear per that. Say if Location ‘A’ was clicked on parent-site then the session variable needs to set to ‘LocA’ on the sub-site and the URL should be something like www.abc.com/LocA and if the Location ‘B’ was clicked then the session variable should be set to ‘LocB’ and the URL should appear as www.abc.com/LocB etc.. Trying to figure out how to achieve this. [It will have one front-end for all the locations but different databases for each location.]
I am an entrepreneur with some programming experience from my past (but none related to website designing). Because of the help from all you geniuses and the code samples lying around, I was able to code the parent site and the sub-site (using html, php, js, css ). Now the trouble is how to put it all together and make it work in correlation. Though it will still be a week or two before I get to try it but I am trying to gather insights so that I am ready by the time I reach there. Any help will be deeply appreciated.
I think the fundamental thing to understand before you get deeper is what a URL is. A URL is not part of the content that you display to the user; nor is it the name of a file on your server. A URL is the identifier the user sends your server, which your server can use to decide what content to serve. The existence of "sub-sites", and "databases", and even "files" is completely invisible to the end user, and you can arrange them however you like; you just need to tell the server how to respond to different URLs.
While it is possible to have the same URL serve different content to different users, based on cookies or other means of identifying a user, having entire sites "hidden" behind such conditions is generally a bad idea: it means users can't bookmark that content, or share it with others; and it probably means it won't show up in search results, which need a URL to link to.
When you don't want to map URLs directly to files and folders, the common approach involves two things:
Rewrite rules, which essentially say "when the user requests URL x, pretend they requested URL y instead".
Server-side code that acts as a "front controller", looking at the (rewritten) URL that was requested, and deciding what content to serve.
As a simple example:
The user requests /abc/holidays/spain
An Apache server is configured with RewriteRule /(...)/holidays/(.*) /show-holidays.php?site=$1&destination=$2 so expands it to /show-holidays.php?site=abc&destination=spain
The show-holidays.php script looks at the parameter $_GET['site'] and loads the configuration for sub-site "abc"
It then looks at $_GET['destination'] and loads the appropriate content
The output of the PHP script is sent back to the user
If the user requests /def/holidays/portugal, they will get different content, but the same PHP script will generate it
Both the rewrite rules and the server-side script can be as simple or as complex as you like - some sites have a single PHP script which accepts all responses, looks at the real URL that was requested, and decides what to do; others have a long list of mappings from URLs to specific PHP scripts.

how can i get list of webpages(sitemap) with php?

I need to get limited list of all pages, that belongs to some website Php. How would code look like? Limited means function(some url, limit of page).
There is no standard way to do this. Some web sites publish an XML sitemap and link to it from robots.txt, but most do not.
You may be able to assemble a partial list of pages on a site by crawling the site, e.g. requesting one page on the site, searching for links to other pages, and requesting those pages as well. However, this is not guaranteed to find all pages on a site -- some may not be reachable from the home page! -- and is a complex process.

Trying to incorporate members area from one site into another

I am working on a website where I need to use the login form to log into a different site and then bring the member's area from that site over to the one I am building.
I have access to both sites and can make changes on either one. I would incorporate the code from the old one directly but it is in ASP and I'm working with PHP.
Any ideas? The purpose would be for someone to login to the site through site A (no problem) then get the information from site B (no problem) and present it in site A (no problem if I use cURL to get the site and break it up then display it on the new one). The issue I get into is the links that are on the new site and gathered from the old site will still point to links on the old site. Maybe there is a way to dynamically generate those pages on the new site somehow? Or am I going about it all the wrong way?
It's essentially a proxy. You need to parse and rebuild the links in the html source code received from site B. There are no functions available for this, but there are numerous open-source proxy scripts you can take code from.
Glype should be open-source (site appears to be broken now unfortunately).
https://www.glype.com/
You need to split the links to change them depending on where do they point.
Links to css/js should be rewritten to point to the real url (note that ajax content won't work, because you can't do an ajax request to another website)
Absolute links to the real website should be changed to relative
Relative links should point at your website (ex. $new_url = '/viewpage/?page=' . urlencode($url);)
Absolute links to other domains (not the old website that you proxy) should be dealt somehow, think about what do you want to do with them exactly.

rewriting links in scraped content using mod_rewrite

I'm looking to create an iframe on my site that contains amazon.com, and I'd like to control it (see what product the user is at).
I realize I can't do this because of browser security policy issues, and the only real workaround is to feed the entire page through my server.
So I load the page and I change all the href values from something like
grocery-breakfast-foods-snacks-organic/b/ref=sa_menu_gro7?ie=UTF8&node=16310101&pf_rd_p=328655101&pf_rd_s=left-nav-1&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_i=507846&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=1S4N4RYF949Z2NS263QP
(the links on the site are relative) to 'me.com/work.php?link='.urlencode(theirlink).
The problem is the amount of time this takes - plus PHP runs frequently out of memory doing this.
Could I use mod_rewrite to rewrite all domains from:
http://www.me.com/grocery-breakfast-foods-snacks-organic/b/ref=sa_menu_gro7?ie=UTF8&node=16310101&pf_rd_p=328655101&pf_rd_s=left-nav-1&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_i=507846&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=1S4N4RYF949Z2NS263QP
to:
http://www.me.com/work.php?url=urlencode(thatlink)
And if not, are there any better options rather then going through every <a> tag?
Thanks!
Have you checked out the associates API? You can get your data that way.
https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/advertising/api/detail/main.html
http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?externalID=498&categoryID=14
http://astore.amazon.com/

How to redirect a Google search result to a dynamic Web page?

I'm trying to enter a list of items into Google Base via an XML feed so that, when a user searches for one of these items and then clicks the search result link in Google Base (or plain Google), the user is directed to a dynamic Web page on my Web site. I'm assuming that the only way to specify a specific link (either static or dynamic) is through the attribute in the XML feed. Is that correct? So, for example, if my attribute is:
http://www.example.com/product1-info.html
the user will be directed to the product1-info.html page.
But if, instead of a static product page, I want to have the user redirected to a dynamic page that generates search results from my local database (on my Web site) for all products containing the keyword "product1", would I be able to do something like this?:
http://www.example.com/products.php?productID=product1
Finally, and most importantly, is there any way to specify this landing page (or any specific landing page) from a "regular" Google search? Or is it only possible via Google Base and the attribute? In other words, if I put a bunch of stuff into Google Base, if any of it shows up in a regular Google search, is there a way for me to control what parameters get passed to the landing page (and thus, what search is performed on the landing page), or is that out of my control? I hope I explained this correctly. Thanks in advance for any help.
first question: Yes, urls containing a query_string part are allowed.
http://base.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=78170 says:XML example:
<link>http://www.example.com/asp/sp.asp?cat=12&id=1030</link>
--
Let me rephrase the second question to see if I understand it correctly (might be completely on the wrong track): E.g. products.php?productID=product1 performs a db-search for the product "FooEx" and products.php?productID=product2 for "BarPlus". Now you want google to show the link .../products.php?productID=product1 but not ....?productId=product2 if someone searched for "FooEx" and google decided that your site is relevant? Then it's the same "problem" we all face with search engines: communicate what each url is relevant for. I.e. e.g. have the appropriate (and only the appropriate) keywords appear in the title/h1 element of the page, avoid linking to the same contents with different urls (e.g. product.php?x=1&productId=1 <-> product.php?productId=1&x1, different urls requesting most probably the exact same contents), submit a sitemap, and so on and on....
edit:
and you can avoid the query-string part all together by using something like mod_rewrite (e.g. the front controller for the zend framework makes use of it) or by parsing the contents of $_SERVER["PATH_INFO"] (this requires the webserver to provide that information), e.g. http://localhoast/test.php/foo/bar -> $_SERVER['PATH_INFO']=='/foo/bar'
Also take a look at the link to this thread: How to redirect a Google search result to a dynamic Web page?, it contains the title of the thread, but SO is perfectly happy with How to redirect a Google search result to a dynamic Web page?, too. The title is "only" additional data for search engines and (even more) the user.
You can do the same:
http://www.example.com/products.php/product1/FooEx <-> http://www.example.com/products.php/product2/BarPlus

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