How do I get clean URLS for only 2 variables? - php

Question

I've seen/read questions about clean URLs with .htaccess, but for the life of me, I cannot get them to work for my specific needs. I keep getting 404 message.
Example: www.mysite.com/article.php?id=1&title=my-blog-title
I would like for url to be: www.mysite.com/article/1/my-blog-title
Here's what I have so far in my .htaccess:
Options -MultiViews
#DirectorySlash on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www [NC]
RewriteRule .* http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L]
# Rewrite for article.php?id=1&title=Title-Goes-Here
RewriteRule ^article/([0-9]+)/([0-9a-zA-Z_-]+) article.php?id=$1&title=$2 [NC,L]
#Rewrite for certain files with .php extension
RewriteRule ^contact$ contact.php
RewriteRule ^blogs$ blogs.php
RewriteRule ^privacy-policy$ privacy-policy.php
RewriteRule ^terms-of-service$ terms-of-service.php
Also, is this how I would link to article? article.php?id=<?php echo $row_rsBlogs['id']; ?>&slug=<?php echo $row_rsBlogs['slug']; ?> or article/<?php echo $row_rsBlogs['id']; ?>/<?php echo $row_rsBlogs['slug']; ?>
I'm using Dreamweaver, but I am comfortable hand coding.
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You could use a dispatcher by telling the webserver to redirect all request to e.g. index.php..
In there a dispatch instance analizes the request and invokes certain controllers (e.g. articlesControllers)
class Dispatcher
{
// dispatch request to the appropriate controllers/method
public static function dispatch()
{
$url = explode('/', trim($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], '/'), 4);
/*
* If we are using apache module 'mod_rewrite' - shifting that 'request_uri'-array would be a bad idea :3
*/
//array_shift($url);
// get controllers name
$controller = !empty($url[0]) ? $url[0] . 'Controller' : 'indexController';
// get method name of controllers
$method = !empty($url[1]) ? $url[1] : 'index';
// get argument passed in to the method
$parameters = array();
if (!empty($url[2])) {
$arguments = explode('/', $url[2]);
foreach ($arguments as $argument) {
$keyValue = explode('=',$argument);
$parameters[$keyValue[0]] = $keyValue[1];
}
}
// create controllers instance and call the specified method
$cont = new $controller;
if(!method_exists($cont,$method)) {
throw new MethodNotFoundException("requested method \"". $method . "\" not found in controller \"" . $controller . "\"");
}
$cont->$method($parameters);
}
}
in .htaccess
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^.*$ index.php