I have a website and i am using MySQL to store and fetch data from, there is a bunch of data of different destinations (Yes this is a travel agent website) i am wondering how can i setup .htaccess file to display SEO friendly URL
For example: http://www.mywebsite.com/flights-result.php?id=10 this URL is a details page for a flight to Entebbe in Africa, i would like to have the URL for this like http://www.mywebsite.com/Africa/Entebbe.htm
And so on for them, one more thing do i need to add this for every page? the data is being update on daily basis so is there any easy way to write URL automatically?
Any help highly appreciated.
I don't really think what you are trying to accomplish has anything to do with mysql. What you are looking for is called URL rewriting. There are countless number of articles out there that could show you the direction to follow. I am not very sure which web server you are using right not. I presume it is Apache. Here is Apache module_rewrite guide.
Given the original URL, there isn't all the information in there to use mod_rewrite to do this completely.
So what you could do it send all web requests to a controller file, and from there parse the request uri and load the correct page.
So in htaccess, something like...
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^.*$ controller.php [L]
Then in controller.php you parse the url and load the correct page.
A different option you may prefer, (if you're flexible on the specific final URL) is to have URLs ending up looking like this:
http://www.mywebsite.com/flights/10/Africa/Entebbe.htm
This would likely be simpler to do instead of implementing a controller (although I prefer the controller for routing requests).
So in htaccess...
RewriteRule
^/flights/([0-9]{1,10})/([a-zA-Z]+)/([a-zA-Z]+)\.htm$
flights-result.php?id=$1&country=$2&place=$3 [L]
Then near the start of the flights-results.php file you should load the data for the id, then check that the provided "country" and "place" are correct (to stop people just entering anything here), and return a 4040 if it's not.
Remember to change all the links your app outputs to the new style as well.
You could also, as you mentioned, hard code all these URLs into a htaccess, but that's not ideal :)
Related
I'm trying to learn, so please be kind. My site is database driven and uses ID numbers to generate the pages. I'd like the URL not to show the ID number but the name of the page. Is there a way to do this where it is just cosmetic and doesn't effect the site? I'm also most likely screwing up the way I'm writing the redirect as it doesn't seem to work at all? What am I doing wrong? Thank you.
This is how my URL looks now:
http://mydomainname.com/index.php?id=35-Entertainment
I'd like it to look like this:
http://mydomainname.com/Entertainment
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^([^/d]+)/?$ index.php?id=$1 [L,QSA]
Unfortunate there is not a way to do this.
The process in this case is the following:
A user enters the a url. In this case you want a nicely formatted URL (http://mydomainname.com/Entertainment)
The user sends this url to your server
Apache processes the url and points it to your project directory based on the domain used in the url
There Apache uses the htaccess to see what to do next. In this case the best method would most likely be to use RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?url=$1 [QSA,L] or something like that
Then you need to do the routing within your app. You can use a routing table for instance to map the nicely formatted slug to an module/id combination
This process can't be done by Apache for it does not known about the content present in your database.
Hopefully this is of any help for you.
Is it possible to have the same URL for both the mobile and desktop versions? I don't mean a responsive site, but a completely separate mobile site with his own index.php, css and js files.
I would like the URL to remain unchanged and if the user enters from a mobile device to the website example.com it redirects to the appropriate index of a mobile version but the URL still remains example.com not m.example.com.
How can that be achieved?
The answer is Yes.
For example in Apache you can use mod_rewrite module and redirect the request to different index.php file depending on the client user agent.
Example:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} "..." [NC]
RewriteRule .* mobile.php [L]
RewriteRule .* desktop.php [L]
Also you can use one index.php as entry point, but you application can load different templates (theme) depending on the client user agent.
Personally i would recommend to search in apache context to archive your goal. Basicly you just want to redirect the user to different vhosts and you want a device detection to select the right vhost. Please correct me if im wrong.
I will link a short acticle here where you can find a detailes tutorial to get this done.
Now you just need a good rewrite rule in your vhost-configuration to keep the domain unchanged. Deep tutorial about rewriterules
If you already use a front controller for both your sites.
You can replace the existing one with something like this:
<?php
$front_path = is_mobile() ? '/path/to/mobile/front.php' : '/path/to/default/front.php';
chdir(dirname($front_path));
require_once $front_path;
function is_mobile() {
// Your logic here. Probably sniffing headers.
}
This with a name-spaced folder structure:
$static_base_url = '/static/mobile';
Then a CSS url would look something like this:
$static_base_url . '/css/main.css'
If you already have your application adapted for use with a CDN then you may not need these changes.
Your assets may already be indexed by search engines, and restructuring may not be possible. If so perhaps look at conditional reverse proxying.
(Rafts of existing rewrite rules and redirects may also complicate matters.)
I am using Windows IIS 7 with PHP and MySQL.
Whenever someone opens an account on my website, he/she will also create one store ID like MyHawaiiSpa. Once this store ID is generated, it can not be changed. Here I have assumed the pkid of this account is 1.
Now, a visitor clicks the MyHawaiiSpa store link from the home page. The visitor will be sent to shop.php where all items belonging to MyHawaiiSpa will be displayed. By clicking on any product on the MyHawaiiSpa store, the product.php page will open, where product details are displayed.
Currently, I have managed it using querystring in PHP. so each store is distinguished like this: mywebsite.com/user/shop.php?sid=1.
My question is now this: I would like visitor clicks on the MyHawaiiSpa store link from the home page, so that the visitor will see mywebsite.com/user/MyHawaiiSpa/shop.php instead of mywebsite.com/user/shop.php?sid=1 (which I have already done now.)
The solution I was thinking of was this: Whenever someone opens an account and creates their store ID, the folder MyHawaiiSpa will be created and the shop.php as well as the product.php pages will be copied under the MyHawaiiSpa folder programmatically. This process will be repeated for all stores those are going to be created.
Is there any other way to do this so I don't need to create a folder and copy files for each store and still I can get desired result I just explained above?
Well it bad idea to copy PHP file when someone registered, it will be mess to maintain it in long term, you just need to store the ID MyHawaiiSpa as unique key in database. and use store id as slug in URL.
since you are using IIS here is good read to rewrite URL
http://www.iis.net/learn/application-frameworks/install-and-configure-php-applications-on-iis/provide-url-rewriting-functionality
You can learn .htaccess mod_rewrite from this link
and then you can covert these rules to IIS7 friendly using this link
You need to use URL rewriting . It is very easy to learn and implement.
On linux servers it is done using a file call .htaccess. On IIS I think file is called
web.config
Basically what this does is, you configure it to show one url while in reality you go to another url.
These links should get you up and running fast
http://www.robbagby.com/php/php-and-iis-running-php-under-fast-cgi-and-url-rewriting/
http://salopek.eu/content/26/introduction-to-url-rewriting-using-iis-url-rewrite-module-and-regular-expressions
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guzJWqNJ3DA&feature=channel
http://www.phpgenious.com/2010/04/url-rewriting-with-php-and-iis-7/
http://www.iis.net/learn/application-frameworks/install-and-configure-php-applications-on-iis/provide-url-rewriting-functionality
A good way to do this is an .htaccess rewrite which will allow you to turn your query into an SEO-friendly url and still read properly when called on that page.
Here is apache documentation
A basic example of a rewrite to force all requests through the index page unless they are a real folder or file would be something along the lines of:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(/$|\.|^$)
RewriteRule (.*) %{REQUEST_URI}/ [R=301,L]
RewriteCond $1 !^(index.php|images|robots.txt)
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php?$1 [NC,QSA,L]
To do a similar rewrite on a windows server you would need to edit a web.config file.
I have a dynamic PHP based site and I've recently noticed its generating a lot of weird pages like this:
http://www.festivalsnap.com/festival/3151748-16th+Annual+Magnolia+Fest+/hotels/3151748-16th+Annual+Magnolia+Fest+/ticket/hotels
The site architecture should be like this www.mysite.com/festival/ and then there are 4 possible child pages for each event... /lineup /tickets /hotels /news
As you can see from the URL it just keeps creating more and more unwanted child pages. When I run a sitemap generator it will just keep going forever and creating more of these pointless pages.
It shouldn't go any deeper than the /hotels page but for some reason its just adding more and more child pages using any combination of the above pages.
I'm no good with PHP and my developer isnt being very helpful. Anyone know what could be causing this?
Edit:
The main event page comes from a file called festival.php and then there are 4 child pages under that - lineup.php tickets.php hotel.php and news.php that get variables from the event page (event title, dates, location, etc) and use it to search for tickets, hotels, etc.
I have noticed that I can tack on basically anything to the URL and it will add it in as part of the page title/event title. It looks like there is something weird going on with .htaccess
Here is the .htaccess code:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.festivalsnap.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.festivalsnap.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule festival/(.*)-(.*)/lineup$ lineup.php?eveid=$1&festival=$2
RewriteRule festival/(.*)-(.*)/news$ news.php?eveid=$1&festival=$2
RewriteRule festival/(.*)-(.*)/tickets$ ticket.php?eveid=$1&festival=$2
RewriteRule festival/(.*)-(.*)/hotels$ hotel.php?eveid=$1&festival=$2
RewriteRule festival/(.*)-(.*)/hotels/(.*)$ hotel.php?eveid=$1&festival=$2&hsort=$3
RewriteRule festival/(.*)-(.*)$ event_page.php?eveid=$1&festival=$2
RewriteRule artists/(.*)-(.*)$ artists.php?artid=$1&artname=$2
This is partly something to do with your generator, and partly to do with .htaccess. The .* operator is extremely aggressive, so your .htaccess file says pretty much anything containing festival/ with a hyphen somewhere later in the URL is a valid URL.
But that doesn't explain why your generator is "finding" all of those pages; there must be some bad links being created somewhere, either internally in the generator or in links on pages on your site.
Can you post some code?
EDIT: The .htaccess code should be much narrower - try replacing each of the occurrences of (.*) with ([^/]*).
As for the PHP, it's impossible to say exactly what is going on, but it sounds like the generator is finding those links on your site somewhere and following them, in which case the sitemap generator is working correctly, but your content has problems. Check your logs, find one of the incorrect URLs, and see what page referred the user there. That will tell you where to look for the bad code.
I have some PHP and HTML in the same file, and I am not exactly sure how to make the URL appear as the name of that page.
Here is an example of what I would like to do: lets say some page id = 1 and the title of that page is HelloWorld.
Instead of site.com/page.php?id=1 I would like the url to appear as site.com/HelloWorld
But the problem I am having is that I only get to know the title of the page inside that page after I query for the title by id.
Considering the setup I described, is there a way to make the urls appear as the names of the pages? And also, if someone links to that page by using the better looking url with the name of the page instead of the id, is there still a way to get the id and by that, the rest of the page contents?
Thanks!!
What you need is to learn more on how .htaccess work.
Here is a good link that got me started:
.htaccess tricks and tips
Update:
Here is a very common practice in many framework where all requests are sent to index.php, and from there you use php to serve the correct page:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.site.com/index.php [L,R=301]
</IfModule>
This is actually a function of your HTTP server software (often Apache), not of PHP.
What you're seeing happen on sites with "friendly" URLs is that the friendly name is captured in a Regular Expression and then passed to PHP.
For example:
GET /HelloWorld
is sent to your web server.. the web server parses it
RewriteCond ^(A REGULAR EXPRESSION TO CAPTURE YOUR FRIENDLY NAME)$
RewriteRule page.php?id=(EXPRESSION FROM ABOVE)
In this way your PHP script will always receive the friendly name as a parameter.
Take a look at "mod_write" for Apache - which you can often create rules for using an ".htaccess" file in the root directory.