Cant get .htaccess to work proper - php

Question

i am doing a URL-Shortener where i am trying to do it URL friendly.. Currently my adress is typed like this "example.com/index.php?name=sitename" i want it do be like "example.com/sitename".. I guess i could use some cool rewrite rule but i cant get it to work..
I did something like this but it wont work
Options All -Indexes
DirectoryIndex index.php index.html index.htm
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^([^/]*)/$ /index.php?name=$1 [L]
but i dont know :s?

Answer 1

Here is the code you need to place in DOCUMENT_ROOT/.htaccess
Options All +FollowSymLinks -MultiViews -Indexes
DirectoryIndex index.php index.html index.htm
RewriteEngine On
# external redirect from actual URL to pretty one
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,}\s/+index\.php\?name=([^\s&]+) [NC]
RewriteRule ^ /%1? [R=301,L]
# internal forward from pretty URL to actual one
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/?$ /index.php?name=$1 [L,QSA]
Reference: Apache mod_rewrite Introduction

Answer 2

Your regular expression will fail on URLs with more than one / after the domain, because [^/] stops as soon as it sees one of these characters, and then it looks for the last slash with /$, which is not always the case.
Assuming you want to convert these URLs
example.com/HiThere
example.com/Your/Page
to:
example.com/index.php?name=HiThere
example.com/index.php?name=Your/Page
Try this rewrite rule instead:
RewriteRule ^(.*?)/$ /index.php?name=$1 [L]
This will look for all characters with (.*?) UNTIL it reaches the last /. I'm not 100% sure about the [L] flag, though.

Answer 3

the simplest method is to use 404 error to point to index.php and then get the sitename using php
.htaccess file
ErrorDocument 404 /index.php
PHP CODE
<?php
$sitename=substr(strrchr($_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"],"/"),"1");
now simply visit 'example.com/sitename' and sitename will be stored in $sitename.
And if($sitename==""){//Show your HomePage}
Hope it helps!!