My question is very fundamental: The basic idea of a CMS is that there aren't real content files but in the simplest scenario one single file index.php, which:
reads the URL like domain.com/fruit/pineapple(.php) or
domain.com?cat=fruit&sort=pineapple,
fills itself with the pineapple-content from a datasource,
will be send back then to the client with the alias of the request URL.
About 1) How does the server know that index.php is in charge for every request? Is it only htaccess? Wordpress:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
Is this everything? Every nonexisting file is interpreted as an existing article of the content? So I have to check inside index.php that a forgotten image pineapple.png is sorted out?
About 2) How does the server rewrite the name index.php into /fruit/pineapple(.php) or ?cat=fruit&sort=pineapple ? This can't be a 301-rewrite, the server has to rebaptize index.php into the requested URL.
Question 1: Yes, RewriteEngine takes care of routing every call to index.php.
Edit: Actually, not every call, the lines with !-f !-d test if the call refers to an existing resource. It only routes to index.php if they don't exist. This allows for the server to send existing files (such as images and other included files, like js and css files) without help from index.php.
So, if I request domain.com/fruit/pineapple.jpg, and that image exists, I will get it. if it doesn´t exist, index.php gets called and it may generate a nice looking 404 page.
Question 2: No, this is not taken care by APACHE, it is taken care by index.php itself, by inspecting $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], and mathing its contents against a set of predefined routes.
This is called URL Routing. Each CMS has its own way of doing this, and there are also some libraries for PHP (or any other server-side language you prefer).
You can take a look at a longer explanation about How to Implement URL Routing in PHP
Related
I am trying to setup simple url routing in a Perl web project without haveing to include a framework just for that purpose. I believe this can be accomplished with an .htaccess.
The plan is for any request to the server using example.com/anysubdirectory/... to be routed to a perl/php script that will parse whatever is contained in /anysubdirectory/... and the parameters following it and then determine where to send the user based on that info.
If example.com without any subdirectory is requested I need to still maintain the default behavior of searching for an index page here.
Since the /anysubdirectory/ will be dynamic i'm not able to predefine that /123/ -> option 1 or /abc/ -> option 2
I am not overly familiar with htaccess other than the typical www and base rewrites.
Any help is much appreciated.
I believe I answered my own question using the following in the root .htaccess:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ router.pl?action=$1 [L,NC,QSA]
This seems to be working with my initial testing.
I believe this is how it is working:
If the requested subdirectory is not found as a file
If the requested subdirectory is not found as a directory
Redirect this to the router.pl script along with any leftover parameters from the original url.
EDIT: The above is not working completely, this is still redirecting any file that is not found on the server to the router.pl script. Not really the functionality that I am looking for,i would like this to only happen if it is a subdirectory and not an invalid file
Not sure I want any bot thats guessing filenames to be pegging my script on a regular basis.
Please correct this response if any of the above is not accurate.
I'm trying to display SEO friendly URLs by using a rewrite in our .htaccess file, but I can't get it to work (I've researched many of the related topics on StackExhange and elsewhere, but to no avail). I'd like to get the value of the id on this page...
http://199.119.123.135/info/tool_surety_company.php?id=1
...and display the id value in the URL instead of the ugly "tool_surety_company.php?id=1".
I'm going for a result like this: http://199.119.123.135/info/travelers-group
I'm using the following code in my .htaccess file:
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} \ /+info/tool_surety_company\.php\?id=([^&]+)
RewriteRule ^ /info/%1/? [L,R]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^^info/([^/]+)/?$ /info/tool_surety_company.php?id=$1 [QSA]
But I'm receiving a 404 error.
Any ideas? Thanks in advance!
There might be something I'm misunderstanding here but I believe there would need to be a mechanism on the server side code to load the correct content for the new "seo-friendly url". In other words, sure, you can redirect the user to show a different url but how is the server going to know what content to load for that new url?
Here's a good resource for putting together a simple example.
https://moz.com/ugc/using-mod-rewrite-to-convert-dynamic-urls-to-seo-friendly-urls
Update:
From here - https://mediatemple.net/community/products/dv/204643270/using-htaccess-rewrite-rules
TROUBLESHOOTING
404 Not Found
Examine the new URL in your browser closely. Does it match a file that
exists on the server in the new location specified by the rewrite
rule? You may have to make your rewrite rule more broad (you may be
able to remove the $1 from the second string). This will direct
rewrites to the main index page given in the second string. Or, you
may need to copy files from your old location to the new location.
In other words, the only reason you would be getting a 404 is because the server does not find the file that is requested as defined in the URL visible in your browser address bar.
Htaccess Rewrites are enabled by using the Apache module mod_rewrite,
which is one of the most powerful Apache modules and features
availale. Htaccess Rewrites through mod_rewrite provide the special
ability to Rewrite requests internally as well as Redirect request
externally.
When the url in your browser's location bar stays the same for a
request it is an internal rewrite, when the url changes an external
redirection is taking place. This is one of the first, and one of the
biggest mental-blocks people have when learning about mod_rewrite.
More info from here:
http://www.askapache.com/htaccess/modrewrite-tips-tricks.html
I currently run a site with 750 pages of .html webpages (yeah I know it was a stupid idea, but I'm a novice). I'm looking to move these to php. I don't really want to set up 750 individual 301 redirects and rewrite each page to .php
I've heard that I can use htaccess to this. Anyone know how?
A few additional questions -
Can I permanently redirect these links from html to php without losing my search engine rankings and
if I want to add php to each of the files (i.e. a php file menu (using the include command) to make the links quicker to update will this work? Because won't they still be html files?
Sorry for the stupid questions, but I'm still learning.
Congratulations on a 750 page site - you must have put some work into that.
To collect your current list of pages use a tool called xenu to create an export into excel. You can then easily change the name the files to PHP in column b and create a .htaccees file.
However why would you want 750 php files? If you have lots of data pages, make it one page and suck in the HTML main content and reference one page. If you have a page called warehouse-depot-22-row-44.html then change that to show-warehouse-row.php?depot=22&row=44 and return that content only. This will significantly reduce your number of pages and to start using databases to render the content.
For redirecting you could use the Apache Module mod_rewrite: https://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_rewrite.html
You can use url rewriting to match a specific file name request with a regular expression and then decide where to redirect if matched
RewriteRule ^myname/?$ myname.php [NC,L]
http://www.addedbytes.com/articles/for-beginners/url-rewriting-for-beginners/
Depends on the structure you have.
You want the user to access them in their natural location?
/public_html/folder1/file.php
user would access like
mydomain.com/folder1/file
or you want to map them differently?
Personally I think I would use a rewrite rule to map all requests to my /public_html/index.php and would map the requests from there using php (using include for instance). This gives great flexibility, plus you have a single point of entry for your application which is very beneficial since you can easily maintain control of the application flow.
The .htaccess would look like this
#
# Redirect all to index.php
#
RewriteEngine On
# if a directory or a file exists, use it directly
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
# RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/index\.php
# RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} (/[^.]*|\.(php|html?))$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} (/[^.]*|\.)$ [NC]
RewriteRule .* index.php [L]
of course I place all my not directly accessible files (everything except index and css, js, images, etc) to a folder outside the public_html to ensure no user can ever access them directly ;)
I've had a similar (yet much much smaller) site that went through the same thing.
I have this in my .htaccess:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.html$ $1.php [L]
This will help redirect any visitors to your .html addresses to your .php addresses.
You hopefully have an IDE (I recommend Aptana), and you can use some of the find/change functions project-wide, and hopefully with some time and patience get your internal links from .html to .php.
But, I caution you a little bit - Perhaps it is time to look into a database based CMS, such as Wordpress or Drupal?
I am working on building my first search-engine friendly CMS. I know that perhaps one of the biggest keys to having and SEO site is to have search-engine friendly URLs. So having a link like this:
http://www.mysite.com/product/details/page1
will result in much better rankings than one like this:
http://www.mysite.com/index.php?pageID=37
I know that to create URLs like the first one, I have one of two options:
use a web technology, in this case PHP, to create a directory structure
leverage Apache's mod_rewrite add-on to have these URLs passed to a PHP processor
As far as the PHP goes, I'm pretty comfortable with anything. However, I think the first option would be more difficult to maintain.
Could someone show me how to write an .htaccess file, which will:
silently direct SEO URLs to a processor script
not redirect if the requested URL is an actual directory on the server
Is there a better way than the way I am trying it?
You can use .htaccess for apache, create file in your root folder of web mainly "htdocs" name it ".htaccess" add next content to it
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?url=$1 [QSA,L]
Options -Indexes
</IfModule>
in your php file you can access data from $_GET
$_GET['url'];
Then you can use data to parse what you need.
Yes, the first option would be pretty hard to maintain. If you want to change the header of the pages, you'd need to recalculate all of the pages.
The simplest way to do that would be to have a PHP file named product.php or product/details.php and use the $_SERVER\['PATH_INFO'\] variable to figure out what the client requested.
I just inherited a website built in PHP. The main page of www.mysite.com has a href to www.mysite.com/index/35.html somewhere in the page. In the site's root directory and its children there is no document 35.html.
The number 35 is actually an id found in a DB which also holds the html contents of the page.
If I load URL: www.mysite.com/index.php?id=35 the same page loads.
How does PHP know how to automatically convert
/index/35.html
to
/index.php?id=35
EDIT
Based on the answers, I have found a .htaccess file containing rewrite instructions that would explain the functionality.
However, IIS doesn't seem to (or is not configured) know how to use this. (probably because this is an Apache feature?)
So this begs the following question: Is there a way to configure IIS to work with this?
it will be done usign URL Rewriting using .htaccess - should be in the webroot.
It may look something like:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php [QSA,L]
May have other bits, but what this basically tells apache is to send anything that DOES NOT physically exist to index.php
It doesn't. There is a mod_rewrite rule that rewrites from /index/foo to /index.php?id=foo, either in a .htaccess file somewhere or in the httpd configuration itself.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^index/([\d]+)\.html /index.php?id=$1 [NC,L]
This is off the top of my head. Any browsers trying to load an address starting with index/ has any number ending in .html will be internally redirected to index.php?id= whatever the number is.
Edit: Just saw that your working on IIS. This probably won't work for you. Sorry.
I think you will be using .htaccess to redirect all requests to index.php. From there You can pass the query string a routing class, which will parse the url and identify the unique ids.
In this case we can say like, your routing class will parse the request /index/35.html to indexController, indexAction, id=35. now you can pass this id to the model to get corresponding page contents
NB : Here I a am assuming you are using mvc pattern. Anyway it can be treated in your own way, with the concept remaining the same. Hope this make sence.