Rewrite custom urls with Joomla SEF - php

I'm trying to wrap my head around rewriting some urls internally in Joomla! 1.7 with SEF features turned on but can't seem to figure it out:
The following SEF URL exists (menu item):
website.com/local/amsterdam
What I would like is the following:
http://website.com/local/amsterdam/trends (non-existant)
to render
http://website.com/local/amsterdam?show=trends
while still displaying the first URL.
Working with .htaccess the following works (but doesn't show SEF URL):
RewriteRule ^local/amsterdam/trends$ index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=14&Itemid=176&show=trends [L]
But this doesn't:
RewriteRule ^local/amsterdam/trends$ local/amsterdam?show=trends [L]
I'm hoping to find a solution without having to use an id so that it will dynamically render the correct page for all cities. I'ld appreciate any thoughts on doing this in .htaccess as well as any different solutions to achieve this! Thanks in advance.

Although I was initially searching for a mod-rewrite solution I have figured out a way to achieve the same by modifying the (core) Joomla! router.
On line 47 of includes/router.php after:
$path = substr_replace($path, '', 0, strlen(JURI::base(true)));
I added the following:
$subpages = array("trends","other"); //Add URL segments you want to reroute
foreach ($subpages as $subpage):
if (strstr($path, "/".$subpage)) :
$path = str_replace("/".$subpage, "", $path);
$vars['show'] = $subpage;
endif;
endforeach;
Now when loading http://www.website.com/local/amsterdam/trends, this URL is displayed while the page http://www.website.com/local/amsterdam is actually loaded with the ?show=trends parameter.
For me this a more flexible solution than using mod-rewrite even though a core file is modified. You might want to use some conditional statements to only run this code in certain conditions. Hope it helps.

Related

How to make a URL link like this http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/php [duplicate]

When you edit a question on stackoverflow.com, you will be redirected to a URL like this:
https://stackoverflow.com/posts/1807421/edit
But usually, it should be
https://stackoverflow.com/posts/1807491/edit.php
or
https://stackoverflow.com/posts/edit.php?id=1807491
How was
https://stackoverflow.com/posts/1807421/edit
created?
I know that Stackoverflow.com was not created by using PHP, but I am wondering how to achieve this in PHP?
With apache and PHP, you might perform one of your examples using a mod_rewrite rule in your apache config as follows:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/posts/(\d+)/edit /posts/edit.php?id=$1
This looks for URLs of the "clean" form, and then rewrites them so that they are internally redirected to a particular PHP script.
Quite often rules like this are used to route all requests into a common controller script, which might do something like instantiate a "PostsController" class and ask it to handle an edit request. This is a common feature of most PHP application frameworks.
It's called routing. Take a look at tutorials on the subject.
If you use a framework such as cake php it should be built in.
As #mr-euro stated you can use mod_rewrite but front controller is a far better solution.
You force every request to index.php and you write your application controlling in index.php.
You use Apache's .htaccess/mod_rewrite, and optionally a PHP file, which is the approach I like to take myself.
For the .htaccess, something like this:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php
Then in your PHP file, you can do something like this:
The following should get everything after the first slash.
$url = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
You can then use explode to turn it into an array.
$split = explode('/', $url);
Now you can use the array to determine what to load:
if ($split[1] == 'home')
{
// display homepage
}
The array is starting from 1 since 0 will usually be empty.
It's indeed done by mod_rewrite, or with multiviews. But i prefer mod_rewrite.
First: you create a .htaccessfile with these contents:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^posts/([0-9])/(edit|delete)$ /index.php?page=posts&postId=$1&action=$2
Obvious, mod_rewrite must be enabled by your hostingprovider ;)
Using mod_rewrite this can be achieved very easily.
I am poor at this but i do know you can redirect urls using apache mod_rewrite and by touching config files. From what i remember htaccess can be used to redirect. Then internally when the user hits
http://stackoverflow.com/posts/1807421/edit it can use your page http://stackoverflow.com/edit.php?p=1807421 instead or whatever you want.
You could use htaccess + write an URI parser class.

how to use $_GET with this url format site.com/extension/rar

I am seeing this url format at most websites.
site.com/extension/rar
I wonder how they get the value='rar' using $_GET.
What I know is that $_GET can be use in here
site.com/extension/index.php?ext=rar
Now I wanted to change my way of calling a variable.
I wanted to apply what most websites do.
How can I call variable in the former?
Perhaps this works to get the "rar":
$name = basename($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);
I most likely being done using .htaccess
It is an Apache module that allows you "rewrite" urls at the engine level based on your own set of rules. So basically it rewrites URLs on the fly.
So, in your example you could have a file named .htaccess with the following contents: (there may be other options)
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^extension/([a-z0-9]+)$ somefile.php?extension=$1 [L]
Basically, you are saying: If someone is looking for a URL that looks like "extension/somenumbers-and-letters" then show the contents of "somefile.php?extension=whatever-those-number-and-leters-are".
Do a search on Apache mod_rewrite to find more information.

URL rewriting advice please

I would like to make my urls more seo friendly and for example change this:
http://www.chillisource.co.uk/product?&cat=Grocery&q=Daves%20Gourmet&page=1&prod=B0000DID5R&prodName=Daves_Insanity_Sauce
to something nice like this:
http://www.chillisource.co.uk/product/Daves_Gourmet/Daves_Insanity_Sauce
What is the best way of going about doing this? I've had a look at doing this with the htaccess file but this seems very complicated.
Thanks in advance
Ben Paton, there is in fact a very easy way out. CMSes like Wordpress tend to use it instead of messing around with regular expressions.
The .htaccess side
First of, you use an .htacess with the content below:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
Let me explain what it does (line by line):
if the apache module named mod_rewrite exists..
turn the module on
let it be known that we will rewrite anything starting after the
domain name (to only rewrite some directories, use RewriteBase
/subdir/)
if the requested path does not exist as a file...
and it doesn't even exist as a directory...
"redirect" request to the index.php file
close our module condition
The above is just a quick explanation. You don't really need it to use this.
What we did, is that we told Apache that all requests that would end up as 404s to pass them to the index.php file, where we can process the request manually.
The PHP side
On the PHP side, inside index.php, you simply have to parse the original URL. This URL is passed in the $_SERVER variable as $_SERVER['REDIRECT_URL'].
The best part, if there was no redirection, this variable is not set!
So, our code would end up like:
if ( isset( $_SERVER['REDIRECT_URL'] ) ) {
$url = explode('/', $_SERVER['REDIRECT_URL'] );
switch($url[0]){
case 'home': // eg: /home/
break;
case 'about': // eg: /about/
break;
case 'images': // eg: /images/
switch( $url[1] ){
case '2010': // eg: /images/2010/
break;
case '2011': // eg: /images/2011/
break;
}
break;
}
}
Easy Integration
I nearly forgot to mention this, but, thanks to the way it works, you can even end up not changing your existing code at all!
Less talk, more examples. Let's say your code looked like:
<?php
$page = get_page($_GET['id']);
echo '<h1>'. $page->title .'</h1>';
echo '<div>'. $page->content .'</div>';
?>
Which worked with urls like:
index.php?id=5
You can make it work with SEO URLs as well as keep it with your old system at the same time. Firstly, make sure the .htaccess contains the code I wrote in the one above.
Next, add the following code at the very start of your file:
if ( isset( $_SERVER['REDIRECT_URL'] ) ) {
$url = explode('/', $_SERVER['REDIRECT_URL'] );
$_GET['id'] = $url[0];
}
What are we doing here? Before going on two your own code, we are basically finding IDs and information from the old URL and feeding it to PHP's $_GET variable.
We are essentially fooling your code to think the request had those variables!
The only remaining hurdle to find all those pesky <a/> tags and replace their href accordingly, but that's a different story. :)
It's called a mod_rewrite, here is a tutorial:
http://www.workingwith.me.uk/articles/scripting/mod_rewrite
What about using the PATH_INFO environment variable?
$path=explode("/",getenv("PATH_INFO"));
echo($path[0]."; ".$path[1] /* ... */);
Will output
product; Daves_Gourmet; Daves_insanity_Sauce
The transition from using $_GET to using PATH_INFO environment is a good programming exercise. I think you cannot just do the task with configuration.
try some thing like this
RewriteRule ^/([a-zA-Z0-9]+)/([a-zA-Z0-9]+)/([a-zA-Z0-9]+) /$1.php?id1=$2&id2=$3 [QSA]
then use $_GET to get the parameter values...
I'll have to add: in your original url, there's a 'prod' key, which seems to consist of an ID.
Make sure that, when switching to rewritten urls, you no longer solely depend upon a unique id, because that won't be visible in the url.
Now, you can use the ID to make a distinction between 2 products with the same name, but in case of rewriting urls and no longer requiring ID in the url, you need to make sure 1 product name can not be used multiple times for different products.
Likewise, I see the 'cat'-key not being present in the desired output url, same applies as described above.
Disregarding the above-described "problems", the rewrite should roughtly look like:
RewriteRule ^/product/(.*?)/(.*?)$ /product?&cat=Grocery&q=$1&page=1&prod=B0000DID5R&prodName=$2
The q & prodName will receive the underscored value, rather than %20, so also that will require some patching.
As you can see, I didn't touch the id & category, it'll be up to you to figure out how to handle that.

How was a URL like http://stackoverflow.com/posts/1807421/edit created in PHP?

When you edit a question on stackoverflow.com, you will be redirected to a URL like this:
https://stackoverflow.com/posts/1807421/edit
But usually, it should be
https://stackoverflow.com/posts/1807491/edit.php
or
https://stackoverflow.com/posts/edit.php?id=1807491
How was
https://stackoverflow.com/posts/1807421/edit
created?
I know that Stackoverflow.com was not created by using PHP, but I am wondering how to achieve this in PHP?
With apache and PHP, you might perform one of your examples using a mod_rewrite rule in your apache config as follows:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/posts/(\d+)/edit /posts/edit.php?id=$1
This looks for URLs of the "clean" form, and then rewrites them so that they are internally redirected to a particular PHP script.
Quite often rules like this are used to route all requests into a common controller script, which might do something like instantiate a "PostsController" class and ask it to handle an edit request. This is a common feature of most PHP application frameworks.
It's called routing. Take a look at tutorials on the subject.
If you use a framework such as cake php it should be built in.
As #mr-euro stated you can use mod_rewrite but front controller is a far better solution.
You force every request to index.php and you write your application controlling in index.php.
You use Apache's .htaccess/mod_rewrite, and optionally a PHP file, which is the approach I like to take myself.
For the .htaccess, something like this:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php
Then in your PHP file, you can do something like this:
The following should get everything after the first slash.
$url = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
You can then use explode to turn it into an array.
$split = explode('/', $url);
Now you can use the array to determine what to load:
if ($split[1] == 'home')
{
// display homepage
}
The array is starting from 1 since 0 will usually be empty.
It's indeed done by mod_rewrite, or with multiviews. But i prefer mod_rewrite.
First: you create a .htaccessfile with these contents:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^posts/([0-9])/(edit|delete)$ /index.php?page=posts&postId=$1&action=$2
Obvious, mod_rewrite must be enabled by your hostingprovider ;)
Using mod_rewrite this can be achieved very easily.
I am poor at this but i do know you can redirect urls using apache mod_rewrite and by touching config files. From what i remember htaccess can be used to redirect. Then internally when the user hits
http://stackoverflow.com/posts/1807421/edit it can use your page http://stackoverflow.com/edit.php?p=1807421 instead or whatever you want.
You could use htaccess + write an URI parser class.

How to solve the case when users surf to index.php

In Zend framework, using the MVC, if A user surf explicitly to http://base/url/index.php instead of just http://base/url, The system thinks the real base url is http://base/url/index.php/ and according to that calculates all the URLs in the system.
So, if I have a controller XXX and action YYY The link will be
http://base/url/index.php/XXX/YYY which is of course wrong.
I am currently solving this by adding a line at index.php:
$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"]=str_replace('index.php','',$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"]);
I am wondering if there is a built-in way in ZF to solve this.
You can do it with ZF by using Zend_Controller_Router_Route_Static (phew!), example:
Read the manual page linked above, there are some pretty good examples to be found.
$route = new Zend_Controller_Router_Route_Static(
'index.php',
array('controller' => 'index', 'action' => 'index')
);
$router->addRoute('index', $route);
Can't say I totally disagree with your approach. That said, others may well point out 5000 or so disadvantages. Good luck with that.
Well it really depends on how you want to solve this. As you know the Zend Frameworks build on the front controller pattern, where each request that does not explicitly reference a file in the /public directory is redirected to index.php. So you could basically solve this in a number of ways:
Edit the .htaccess file (or server configuration directive) to rewrite the request to the desired request:
RewriteRule (.*index.php) /error/forbidden?req=$1 // Rewrite to the forbidden action of the error controller.
RewriteRule index.php /index // Rewrite the request to the main controller and action
Add a static route in your bootstrapper as suggested by karim79.
Use mod_rewrite. Something like this should do it:
RewriteRule ^index.php/(.*)$ /$1 [r=301,L]
I don't think you should use a route to do this.
It's kind of a generic problem which shouldn't be solved by this way.
You better should have to do it in your .htaccess, which will offer you a better & easier way to redirect the user to where you want, like to an error page, or to the index.
Here is the documentation page for the mod_rewrite
I've never faced this problem using Zend Framework. just do not link to index.php file. that's it. and when your are giving your application's address to users, just tell them to go to http://base/url/
when the user enters http://base/url/ her request URI is base/url and your .htaccess file routs the request to index.php, but the request IS base/url. you do not need to remove 'index.php' from the request. because it is not there.
when you are trying to generate URLs for links and forms and ..., use the built-in url() view helper to generate your links. like this:
// in some view script
<a href="<?php
echo $this->url( array('controller'=>'targetController','action'=>'targetAction') );
?>" >click</a>
do not worry about the link. Zend will generate a URL for you.
The way I look at this is that if I have a website powered by PHP and a user goes to http://site/index.aspx then I would send a 404.
Even though index.php does exist in theory, it's not a valid URL in my application so I would send a 404 in this case too.

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