How to create pages automatically with php? (More details inside) - php

Question

I'm developing a news website with php-mysql.
This is the table:
news_id INT(6) UNSIGNED AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
news_title VARCHAR(250) NOT NULL,
news_short_description TEXT NOT NULL,
news_full_content TEXT NOT NULL,
news_author VARCHAR(30) NOT NULL,
news_published_on DATE NOT NULL
)";
on the index page of the website will be shown the articles.
$sql = "SELECT news_id,news_title,news_short_description,news_full_content,news_author,news_published_on FROM ARTICOLI ORDER BY news_id DESC LIMIT 10";
$result = $conn->query($sql);
if ($result->num_rows > 0) {
// output data of each row
while($row = $result->fetch_assoc()) {
echo "<h3>". $row["news_title"]. " </h3><br> " . $row["news_short_description"]. "<br> " ."Posted by ". $row["news_author"]. "<br>";
}
} else {
echo "0 results";
}
WHAT I NEED?
i don't know how to create automatic pages and links for the single articles.
EXAMPLE: www.website.com/this-is-the-title-of-the-article.
i was thinking about using the id of the db table,but how to select one precise row?
can you help me? thanks!!! ;)

Answer 1

One idea.
First of all, you need to add a slug field in your table (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_URL#Slug) which will hold the title in the form of this-is-the-title-of-the-article.
The assumption here would be that the "slug" will need to be a unique string in the table.
Secondly, you need to use some sort of rewrite mechanism (e.g. apache's mod_rewrite) to convert request of the form www.website.com/this-is-the-title-of-the-article to something you can handle via a PHP script.
For example www.website.com/this-is-the-title-of-the-article gets rewritten as as www.website.com/index.php?q=this-is-the-title-of-the-article).
Example .htaccess
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php?q=$1 [L]
index.php
<?php
$articleSlug = isset($_GET(["q"])?$_GET["q"]:null;
if ($articleSlug !== null) {
$query = "SELECT news_id,news_title,news_short_description,news_full_content,news_author,news_published_on FROM ARTICOLI WHERE slug=?"; // Bind the ? to $articleSlug
//Execute SQL here and echo the results
} else {
// 404 error
}
I understand this is a very vague description and this is only one way of doing it. I would personally suggest you look into an MVC framework like e.g. Laravel which has all of this functionality already built in.