How someone implement personalized URLs in a website?
For example http://www.facebook.com/john
or
For example http://www.facebook.com/john.smith
Having in mind that the users choose their names (which will be unique and can not change once chosen).
Platform is Apache, PHP, Mysql
Thank you
Using mod_rewrite to redirect traffic to a different path which handles the routing.
If you look at many of the popular PHP frameworks they suggest using a provided .htaccess file which forwards all requests to index.php and from their include their own routing class/script
As part of the routing, you could check if the path matches an existing user, and then make the request display that users page.
You'd use mod_rewrite to rewrite all incoming requests to something like http://example.com/index.php?q={request}. Then you can grab $_GET['q'] in PHP and do whatever you want with it. If it looks like a username, display the user's profile page, if it looks like the name of another page, include that page.
Related
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'm curious to know if there is a way to have URLs be intercepted by a PHP page or some other server side logic such that if the URL "www.mysite.com/about/mission_statement" is queried but I don't have a page at "about/mission_statement", that I can serve up the content from, say, "some/other/folder/with/pages".
Does anybody know if this is possible, or do I have to ensure that I have a page available for every url address I wish to handle?
You cannot do that in PHP directly because a PHP page is invoked in order to process a given URL, but you can do that in your web server.
Assuming Apache have a look at URL rewriting
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/rewrite/
In particular for your case, the subtopic
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/rewrite/remapping.html
is relevant.
IIS has a similar capability.
Again presuming your using Apache, then you have a number of options:
Use a Rewrite rule (as specified in another answer) for specific pages/content or include a line in your .htaccess file that redirects any requests that don't exist (404's) to a specific location/file of your choice.
This is usually envoked using the following code in an .htaccess file either in your docroot directory or other directory of choice:
ErrorDocument 404 /whatever/path/to/file.php
If your using dynamic pages in PHP keyed by, say ID or some other dynamic value, EG:
http://www.somedomain.com/page.php?id=4
then you need to create a function that redirects to your page of choice if the content doesn't match or exist.
Im planning to add language feature to my site. I can see two ways:
storing language in the url, so always www.mysite.com/en/introduce, www.mysite.com/en/home, or if 1st parameter is missing, just use the default. Its good for bookmark, but very hard to implement to all available links
storing in session. Way much easier, but users may gets confused not seeing the language in the URL.
I would say: session. What would you say? Any experiences?
If you want all your pages to be indexed by search engines, you'll have put the language parameter in the URL.
If you're producing more something like Facebook where a user needs to be logged in to receive content in his personalized language, use sessions.
I would use the first method togetter with a url rewrite engine.
F.e. when using RewriteEngine for Apache you could add this line to your .htaccess:
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z])/([a-zA-Z]*)$ content.php?culture=$1&content=$2
and even this can work:
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z])/([a-zA-Z]*)$ $2.php?culture=$1
You want to put your language as part of the url, otherwise google won't be able to index it for different countries. Also, they might think you have two types of content on the same page.
I would store it in session if there's only some parts of content changing as it's easier to implement if you're just changing i.e. contact details for the company based on what country the user is coming from. But as a general rule, give it a separate url either using .htaccess or your routing system.
Regular users don't look at URL and change the parameters from there. Normal users are point and click. Keep the language selection somewhere visible on the page and also in the user settings. This is not something that a user will want to change several times during a visit. We are talking about a setting that you can ask and set on the first visit. Currently I hate the way the google does it using my IP, assuming (wrong) that if I am entering from Norway I definitely speak Norwegian and I can handle finding in Norwegian menus the English version. I do like the way Etsy.com is doing it, they ask you on the first visit what is your preferred language, currency and so on. If you accept them good, but you can change them right there without having to navigate to a menu. In my opinion go for cookies or session instead of polluting the URL.
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
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.