How do I create dynamic URLs? - php

Question

I have a social network that allows users to write blogs and ask questions. I am wanting to create dynamic URLs that post the title of the blog or question on the end of the URL via PHP.
Example:
www.blah.com/the_title_here
Looking for the cleanest most efficient way to accomplish this.

Answer 1

You would usually store the URL-friendly "slug" in the database row, and then have a PHP script that finds posts matching that slug.
For example, if you have a script called index.php that took a parameter called slug...
<?php
if (isset($_GET['slug'])) {
$sql = "SELECT * FROM `your_table` WHERE slug = ? LIMIT 1";
$smt = $pdo->prepare($sql);
$smt->execute(array($_GET['slug']));
$row = $smt->fetchObject();
// do something with the matching record here...
}
else {
// display home page
}
...You could then re-write requests using .htaccess:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.+)$ index.php?slug=$1

Answer 2

Using the database to do this would be sad :(
There may be many cases where you do not need to lookup the database and you will with this method. eg:- www.blah.com/signup (no point here). And db connections eats up resources, serious resources...
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.+)$ index.php?slug=$1
as shown by martin gets you the path or slug.
Most frameworks use filesystem to achieve cleaner URLs.
One folder to hold all files and
something which is similar in theory to
<?php
$default = "home";
//function to make sure the slug is clean i.e. doesnot contain ../ or something
if(isset($_GET['slug'])) $slug = clean($_GET['slug']);
if(!isset($slug)) $slug = $default;
$files = explode('/',$slug);// or any other function according to your choice
$file = "./commands/".$files[0].".php";
if(file_exists($file))
require_once($file);
else
require_once("./commands/".$default.".php");
You can make this as simple to as complicated as you want. You can even use the database to determine the default case like what Martin did, but that should be in the $default and not the first logic you use...
Advantages of doing it this way
It is way faster than querying the database
You can scale this a lot. Vertically eg: site.com/users/piyushmishra and site.com/forums/mykickassforum or even on deeper levels like site.com/category/category-name/post-name/comments/page-3
You can setup libraries and packages easier.Scaling horizontally (add more directories to check and each directory can have one/more modules setup) eg : ./ACLcommands/users.php , ./XMLRPC/ping.php

Answer 3

There are lots of open source software that do this, you can look at WordPress.org or MediaWiki.org to do this. You'll need a combination of .htaccess or Apache configuration settings to add mod_rewrite rules to them.
Next, you'll want a controller file as Martin Bean wrote to look up the post... but make sure you escape/sanitize/validate input properly, otherwise you can be vulnerable to SQL injection or XSS if you have JavaScript on your site.
So it's better to use the id method and only use the slug for pretty-url purposes. WordPress.org software also suggests that going only by the slug makes it slow once you have a lot of posts. So, you can use a combination of www.blah.com/slug-phrase-goes-before-the-numeric_id and write a RegExp to match: .*(\d+)$

Answer 4

"www.blah.com/$id/".preg_replace('/^[a-z-]+/','',preg_replace('/[ ,;.]+/','-',strtolower($title)))
and use only $id
from title
"How do I create dynamic URLs?"
it creates url
www.blah.com/15/how-do-i-create-dynamic-urls