I have a Joomla based community site and with search engine friendly URLs activated in the backend my profiles are located under mysite.com/community/profile/user/"username"
I need the htaccess file to do nothing unless a URL containing "community/profile/user" is found. If that string is found then it should change the link to mysite.com/"username" but in reality be showing the page mysite.com/community/profile/user/"username"
I think this would be rewrite rule instead of redirect, but I barely know what I'm talking about.
Can someone please tell me what code I must place in my .htaccess file in order to change this? I believe .htacces would be the best way to do what I need, but if you have another idea I'm glad to hear it.
First be sure you understand .htaccess's role.
It is only read when an incomming request is made. So it will not change URLs generated by joomla.
You can however allow urls like mysite.com/eddie to actually pull content from mysite.com/blah/blah/eddie
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/rewrite/remapping.html
If you are looking to "train" your users, you can add a step before that to redirect the URL as well. This get's very tricky though as if you're not careful you can get caught in a loop.
user clicks mysite.com/blah/blah/eddie
apache redirects to mysite.com/eddie
(browsers makes second request, user sees URL change)
apache sees mysite.com/eddie and loads the underlying mysite.com/blah/blah/eddie
An easier solution might be to tweak the joomla community code to generate the short urls (mysite/eddie) and use apache to make a call direct to the plugin (mysite/components/communit/index.php?user=eddie
Related
I have http://mysite.com/index.php.
And a sub menu
home => http://mysite.com/index.php
about us => http://mysite.com/about.us.php
products => http://mysite.com/products.php
But i want http://mysite.com/index.php to process every request, and just change the content using Ajax request. This way, the site only loads the content part, and is much faster and easy to navigate.
The problem here is SEO, because the only URL google will see is http://mysite.com/index.php and I would like to associate http://mysite.com/about-us to the About Us content, http://mysite.com/product to the Products content, etc.
I know I can do this with PHP just reading the URL and writing the Ajax on the fly, but doing so the whole page is going to be reloaded every time.
Is there a way to do this without reloading the whole page?
What I think I need is to have a regular anchor in the submenu, for exampel pointing to "http://mysite.com/contact-us" but when clicked, instead of opening this page, process the Ajax request.
And if this is possible, Google is going to see this as black hat probably, right?
Regards
Alex
HERE THERE IS A SOLUTION:
window.history.pushState(data, title, url)
Here Rob explains how it works, and you have a working example:
http://moz.com/blog/create-crawlable-link-friendly-ajax-websites-using-pushstate
you can't change the URL in the address bar without changing the page because to be able to do that I couldlet you visit me at http://www.imhackingyou.com/sucker but change the addressbar to read http://www.bankofamerica.com/login
This is a routing issue, not an AJAX issue.
If you were using another tool (cough ASP.NET MVC cough), you'd just add a route (and I'm hopeful there's a way to do this in PHP) that accepted URLS like
/home
/products
...
and routed them to, say,
/index.php?area=home
/index.php?area=products
This is typically accomplished with a rewrite engine when used outside of a good MVC or RESTful URL system. I use ISAPI Rewrite on IIS, but if you're working on the LAMP stack, I think Apache provides a module that provides the same capabilities. (Google .htaccess )
WARNING: RANT FOLLOWS
And, for what it's worth,
Avoid trying to write your entire application in JavaScript. The server's there for a reason. Part of your job as a web developer is to absorb as much of the work onto your server as possible. Browser performance and compatibility issues will drive you mad when you try to do everything on the client.
Avoiding postbacks makes sense in a lot of circumstances, but it's not a silver bullet that you should try to apply to every page. Usually it makes sense to load a new page when a link is clicked. It's what the user expects, it's more stable (since most of the infrastructure required is server-side) and it's not slower than an AJAX request to retrieve the same thing.
Rules:
NEVER break the back button. Without careful planning, most AJAX apps break this rule.
See rule #1.
This sounds like it should be accomplished with a rewrite engine, but assuming that you have a good reason to use AJAX, you can change urls with javascript by modifying the portion after the hash, or better yet, the hashbang:
window.location.hash = "#!about-us";
http://mysite.com/
http://mysite.com/#!about-us
http://mysite.com/#!products
For more info on the hashbang from an SEO perspective, check out http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-allow-google-to-crawl-ajax-content
How does Shopify do it then? Go to their website, click on the Features link and you'll see the URL says:
http://www.shopify.com/tour/sell-online
Then click on any of the sub links and you'll see that the address in the URl changes without using a hash but there is no page flip.
I don't think they are using ajax to change the content because it all appears to be included in hidden divs on the page, but regardless, you can apparently change the URL using client side tricks.
I am working on this site developed in Wordpress 3.3.1. My client wanted me to develop a public page. This page will be a simple php page. It will reside in wordpress directory but will not be a part of CMS itself. The issue here is that I want a url redirection for this page. My client wants to send a link in email to members of the website, so he wants to keep the url clean.
This is the format of current url that he wants to send to the members:
'http://www.example.com/shop/"url_encoded_category_name"/product/"product_id"'
And I want to redirect it to:
'http://www.example.com/template-public-home?productId="product_id"'
I was rewriting the url for now. But as you can see in the first url format that "url_encoded_category_name" and "product_id" are variables and therefor rewriting would mean that I am trying to rewrite different urls to same url(only query string changes). I want to change it to redirection because as I understand this approach of rewriting multiple urls to the same url is penalized by most of the search engines.
For rewriting I edited the .htaccess file.
What I wanted to ask is that considering that I have a publicly accessible page within wordpress directory:
what is the most suitable way to redirect my url?
In my case what is a better Code? 301 or 302?
Thanks for any assistance you can provide or direct me to a source where I could learn about it.
First of all, if your client just wants to use the generated URL in emails to members, no search engine will ever know. However, if there is a chance that they leak you might indeed end up with duplicate content. Redirection then is the correct approach.
You can redirect just as you rewrite by using the [R] flag in your rule (usually in conjunction with L as [R,L] so that the rules below that match are not executed.
From the point of view of a search engine (and a user as well), these are permanent redirects - you will never ever use the URL in the email as a primary URL (or will you?). That means you should use R=301.
Take a look at the documentation to learn about the flags, test your rewrite rules online here and check https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1426056/good-htaccess-mod-rewrite-url-rewriting-tutorial for some hands-on material.
I have a revision website, it has stuff for multiple school subjects. I am starting to develop subject pages, these will have stuff only for that subject. e.g. a physics page
Anyway, what I am trying to do is let people type in www.myWebsite.com/history or www.myWebsite.com/ict - or what ever. And them get redirected to the appropriate page.
From that it sounds really simple, I would just put a file called history.php in my public_html home directory, right?
But my home directory is super organised, with everything in nice sub folders. I want to but all the subject pages in a sub folder called 'subjects' (imaginative name :p ).
How can I put these pages in the sub folder, yet still let the user access them from the URL examples above?
A great way to do this is to use a Front Controller. You can re-route all requests to one file (typically index.php) via htaccess and then from there grab the URI (the /itc, /history etc.) and use it to direct the request to the appropriate script.
Check this out, should get you started.
http://www.technotaste.com/blog/simple-php-front-controller/
Once you figure that out, you will want to compare the differences between dynamic and static invocation. Cheers.
you've got to do a url rewrite for the same. google out mod_rewrite and you'll get the examples.
If you are running under Apache, mod_rewrite is probably the most direct approach to accomplishing this.
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_rewrite.html
Basically create a .htaccess file in the root that maps the URI segment to the appropriate php file in your 'subjects' directory.
I think this is a case where you could use mod_rewrite, so the web server you're using will redirect the user to the appropiate directory. You can either keep the rewrite list manually or dynamically using regexes.
I have a PHP system containing user-generated pages, arranged in a complex and non-uniform hierarchy. Pages are created by users, and some pages have sub-pages etc.
I have been asked to add a shortened-url system. So any page, at any point in the hierarchy, can be accessed via domain.com/XXXX where XXXX can be anything - we are not interested in SEO here, the reasoning behind this is its a very social-media driven project, and we would like our users to be able to tweet/other the url of any page they like.
I expect something like; we start on AAAA and head towards ZZZZ as each page is created. Each of these slugs would be stored in the database alongside the actual url eg domain.com/projects.php?p=32
I know mod-rewrite enough to convert domain.com/XXXX into domain.com/index.php?slug=XXXX, but where to go from there leaves me a little stumped. index.php can do the database lookup and header() the user to the actual url, but the slug-url needs to stay in the address bar.
Would using an iframe in index.php be a terrible idea?
I hope thats clear, thanks for reading!
If you used the [R=301] directive at the end of an .htaccess rewrite rule, it will act as a redirect. Meaning if you go to domain.com/XXXX it will show domain.com/index.php?slug=XXXX in the address bar. Is that the behavior you're trying to accomplish?
Also, I wouldn't use a header(), I'd make your index page be the processing page. Either that, or use an include() method instead.
I think using an iframe is a terrible idea, and will lead to a brittle site.
Is there any reason why index.php can't act as a front controller, so instead of redirecting it just shows the page? You should just be able to include the page.
Alternatively, could you not rewrite domain.com/XXXX to domain.com/projects.php?slug=XXXX, and do a slug->p conversion at the top of projects.php? Then the conversion would just need to record slugs and page ids, rather than slugs and full URLs.
Do I have to put every file in a different folder?
like:
about-us/about-us.php
profile/profile.php
etc.
or is there any other automatic solution.
I want to convert
http://sitename.com/about-us/about-us.php
to
http://sitename.com/about-us
You want pretty URL rewriting.
An Apache .htaccess examples from that article:
Pretty URL: /browse/animals-24/cats-76.html
Ugly URL: /browse.php?category=24&subcategory=76
.htaccess:
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^browse/[A-Z0-9_-]+-([0-9]+)/[A-Z0-9_-]+-([0-9]+)\.html$ browse.php?category
If you have a directory called about-us, then you could simply create an index.php file within that directory, and by default, your .htaccess file should redirect users to the correct page.
Thus, going to example.com/about-us/ would bring the user to the same page as about-us.php. It would benefit you to do some research about 301 redirection.
http://www.tamingthebeast.net/articles3/spiders-301-redirect.htm
Basically, when Googlebot crawls your website, the last thing you want is for Google to find both copies of the page, one listed as about-us/ and one listed as about-us/about-us.php. Duplicate content is bad, and optimizing your website for search engines is really not at all that difficult to do.
Let's say you have a leaderboard page on your website with 1000 members. Instead of Google finding all leaderboard.php?user=Whatever, it would be a good idea to block that page from being accessed by Google, or else you will result in hundreds of unwanted archived pages on their search engine.
You might also want to make sure your website can be accessed either by www.yourwebsite.com or by simply yourwebsite.com, BUT NOT BY BOTH (without being 301 redirected).
Hope that helped. Happy programming!
EDIT: If you try renaming your about-us.php file to simply index.php, that would be your quick fix. Depending on your .htaccess configuration, I'm willing to bet that would be your easy fix.