I want to mask some of the subdirectories and pages for my website. For example:
I want to change
www.example.com/blog.php?post=post1
to
www.example.com/blog
or something similar to that. I have seen examples about redirecting and such but that doesn't seem to work for what I want and I would like to stay away from iframes if possible. I just want the address bar to not reflect my internal directory structure and page names. I want it to keep showing /blog while they are moving from post to post. Thanks.
P.S. I am not using wordpress or any other CMS or blogging system.
You can use apache mod_rewrite for that.
Mod Rewrite Generator
And if You don't want to have the same url on blog-post/article change, but to display different content, all I can think of this moment is by using either POST method or browser cookies, but, that would require a lot of page reloads, and it simply is not recommended for wide use. If You are building per_se (one person only) panel or similar, than url doesn't matter that much, but, speaking of blog..
It is quite reasonable to hide .php extension or url query index/key, but not what You would like to accomplish.
Like I said, it is possible, but Luke .. don't do that.
Blog should be bookmarkable on each and every #stop, and that happens just because of unique urls and hash values. Without these two, no hyperlinking possible *(not to mention seo penals and flaws + dozen of other unwanted obstacles, page caching for instance).
Related
I am concerned this may not be possible (at least not easily) in Magento (1.4).
So we currently have a site set up:
shopping-public.mysite.com
Searching through core_config_data and the source code, shopping-public is referenced quite a few times.
What I want to accomplish is to have the following subdomain work on the same code base, AND have all the links between pages match up:
shopping-development.mysite.com
I have set up ServerAlias shopping-development.mysite.com in the .conf file, and it works - that is, I'm getting there, and the page is being presented.
However, it does NOT work in the sense that:
a) the references to the CSS files and JS files are still to shop-public.mysite.com, and
b) links to products and other pages are still to shop-public.mysite.com
How do I solve (a) and (b) so that, regardless of the subdomain (or even domain), asset file links and page links change relative to the (sub) domain I am on?
I am fairly new to Magento, and there are a LOT of xml values that reference this involved..
Magento have a lot of configuration.
core_data
htaccess if use apache need test rewrite rules ok or no.
and maybe hardcoded index.php with switch case?
But firstly try clean cache.
Magento will, as you can see, always attempt to redirect back to the primary domain. To achieve this, I think you'd probably be best using different store views/sites and then using .htaccess to load the specific site required.
With this approach, there would be a concern over duplicate-content in Google's eyes I'm sure.
I'm setting up a website where visitors will be greeted by a splash screen where they will choose a color scheme for the actual website; based on their selection, the actual website will load with a different stylesheet. I gather this can be done by concatenating a flag to the URL, then reading the flagged URL on the next page to determine the stylesheet to be loaded (for example, to load the dark theme, the url would become http://www.mywebsite.com/index-dark; clicking the light theme link would make the URL http://www.mywebsite.com/index-light. Problem is, I don't know how to add a flag to a URL, or how to read this flag on a different page. I've tried Googling the issue, but have found little practical information. How can this be done?
EDIT: I'd like to avoid using two separate pages, as I'll have multiple themes; that would mean copying basically every HTML page in my root multiple times, taking up space. I like the idea of a concealed $_GET variable, though.
Without more information, I can only give some general advice.
So I'm going to assume that you are building a page in PHP, so you could have two different urls and use mod_rewrite to convert /index-dark to /index?style=dark but that's crappy.
What you probably want is to use a cookie or a session. Basically you check a cookie, or session value, for the theme setting and then pick the appropriate CSS file when you generate the page.
This has several advantages:
Doesn't require using url rewriting, an error prone endeavour at the best of times
Allows for persistent setting (if you use a cookie) and doesn't involve complicated urls.
Allows for adding more themes without changing mountains of code, just add the setting to theme selector and the new CSS file.
GET variables are generally only useful for specific data sent with that request, a bit like POST variables are mostly for forms and submitted data. If you want persistent settings, then a session/cookie is the best option.
The "flags" you're mentioning are probably actually $_GET variables that have been disguised using mod_rewrite. What you can do is edit your .htaccess file to add in rewrite rules that change, say, www.mywebsite.com/index.php?style=index-dark to www.mywebsite.com/index-dark (unfortunately I don't have experience in how exactly to do this; I just know that it can be done) and have your PHP catch $_GET['style'].
I am creating a webpage with PHP/MySQL, and each page is in its own .php file.
How should I organize the addressbar, when changing the viewing page?
I have thought of two different ways to solve this:
1) www.mywebpage.com/?page=REFERENCES+pageid=GUID_TO_USE_FOR_DB_LOOKUP
2) www.mywebpage.com/references.php?GUID_TO_USE_FOR_DB_LOOKUP
Which should I choose? Are there other ways to do this?
Edit: When the user clicks a link to another page, I want to redirect the user to the corresponding .php file. The question is how to show this in the addressbar in the web browser.
With the GUID_TO_USE_FOR_DB_LOOKUP, I want to pass parameter to the .php file
Another way to do it:
www.mywebpage.com/references/GUID.html
You can use mod_rewrite to use URLs like this and have them mapped to "references.php?GUID=xyz" internally.
However, all solutions are fine and will work the same way (display the page), the advantage of the above is just that the URL is more "readable" as well as better for search engine optimization as the URL-"path" is parsed by search engines (other than using parameters).
Search for "mod_rewrite SEO" to find out more about this topic, e.g.:http://www.htmlist.com/how-to/a-simplemod_rewrite-tutorial/
A couple of questions to ask:
Why do you care about the URL? Should it be human readable? Do you care about SEO? Do you like to use a "framework" with a single point of entry (which could work like your first example)? Do you want to "hide" your actual filenames from your users? etc. etc.
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.
My site currently handles URL's like this...
/?p=home
/?p=profile&userid=1
/?p=users.online
/?p=users.online&page=23
/?p=mail.inbox
/?p=mail.inbox&page=12
... and so on, there is probably at least 120-150 different pages, on my site a page is built like this,
index.php includes a main config file which then includes function/class files into it
index.php then includes a header file
index.php then includes the page file which is from the url ?p=pagename
index.php then includes a footer file
That is how every page on my site is compiled, through the index page like that and I have been considering/thinking about cleanning up the URL's as I am re-writing/restructuring most of my sites code right now, it's the perfect time to do it if I am going to do it. What I mean by cleanning up the URL's is using mod-rewrite so the URL structure above would look like this instead...
/home
/users/1 //user ID might switch to use username as well
/users/online
/users/online/23 or /users/online/page/23
/mail/inbox
/mail/inbox/12
So first of all is there any downfalls to doing this, does it create a lot more processing work since it is using mod_rewrite?
Also would it be hard to write the regex or whatever is needed to match the file names in the format that I show above, I listed only a few of the pages but there would be at least 100 different URL pages I have blogs, bulletins, forums, all kinds of stuff
Absolutely. That's one of Apache's main purposes, so it's been designed to do it very efficiently. In fact, I'd emplore you to use that method.
It makes cleaner URLs for visitors
It's fantastic for SEO
It makes the website more professional
It makes it easier for users to guess URLs if they are trying to find a certain page without actually traversing through your site ti find it.
There are no downfalls, and a ton of advantages to using that URL structure. Go for it!