Is it possible to hide the the url in the address bar of the web browser so that it won't necessarily match the location of the files.
For example, this url:
http://localhost/exp/regstuds.php
You will always know by looking where to find the files in the computer.
Is it possible to distort or disarrange or hide the url in such a way that the location of the files will not be revealed
Yes, if you're using Apache look into using mod_rewrite. There are similar rewrite modules for pretty much all other web servers too.
I hope your sole motivation for doing this is not "security through obscurity". Because if it is, you should probably stop and spend more time on something more effective.
If you are hosting your php on an Apache server, you probably have the ability to use the mod_rewrite utility. You can do this be adding rules to your .htaccess file...
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^RegStuds/ regstuds.php
This would cause http://localhost/RegStuds/ to actually render regstuds.php, but without ever displaying it in the address bar.
If you are on IIS, you can perform the same function using an ISAPI Rewrite Filter.
If you don't have mod_rewrite or an ISAPI Rewrite Filter, you can get a similar result using a folder structure, so you would have a physical path of RegStuds/index.php - and you would never need to link to "index.php" as it is the default file. This is the least recommended way of doing it.
No its not.
Each bit of functionality must have a unique identifier (URI) so that the request is routed to the right bit of code. The mapping can be non-linear using all sorts of tricks - mod_rewrite, front controller, content negotiation...but this is just obscuring what's really going on.
You can fudge what appears in the address bar on the browser by using a front-controller architecture and using forms / POSTs for every request but this is going to get very messy, very quickly.
Perhaps if you were to explain why you wanted to do this we might be able to come up with a better solution.
C.
Related
I usually use this site to solve my problems, but for the first time I couldn't find a proper question, so forgive me if it actually exists!
Currently, I have valid URLs in such format:
http://www.example.com/index/modules/news/article.php?storyid=15807
That the number at the end is generated dynamically by CMS and therefore changes for any new content published.
In order to use shorter URLs, I want these pages to be accessible by subdomain in such format:
http://news.example.com/n15807
Please help me and let me know if there is a better option rather than using htaccess.
Sure! You can use mod_rewrite in apache's virtual host config file.
Sarcasm aside, the way to reroute a url is to use the tool that accepts the url and does something with it, which in the case of the typical php installation is apache. If PHP were able to accept connections without the use of an http server, then PHP could do it. I suppose one could build a server out of php and run it as a singleton, but I've never heard of such a thing.
So here's the thing, using .htaccess and mod_rewrite isn't so hard, if you understand what you're trying to do. In your case, you want to be able to translate news.example.com/n15807 into that really long uri. That really long uri is what the server will actually load.
mod_rewrite in effect matches against a regular expression and replaces it with another uri. So you would attempt to match something like ^([^w]{3}).example.com/([a-z])([0-9]+)$ and use it to replace values in /index/modules/$1/article.php?storyid=$3 (I have no idea what the n in front of the number is supposed to mean.)
The regex I gave is intended only to point you in the right direction; I haven't tested it. [EDIT - It definitely won't work as written; it's been a while since I worked on mod_rewrite. But the idea is still valid. FWIW, I wouldn't try to use subdomains, though]
Summary: Use the tool that works with the urls. The most accessible way is with .htaccess. Once you figure it out, you're done. You can reuse it over and over in future websites.
After hours of searches I finally got it!
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^news.example.com$
RewriteRule ^news/(.*)$ http://www.example.com/index/modules/news/article.php?storyid=$1\#siteBody [R=301,L,NE]
Thought it might help someone someday not to spend as much time as I did!
I am developing a site in core php and i have link such as
Read More
So my question is to remove the .php extension from all the site and also from the links and url must be nice like http://www.example.com/news/ not like http://www.example.com/news.php?news_id = 4
So please if any one has idea how to do that please tell me
I will be summarizing my comments so you can mark this post here as solution for the next person having your problem. This makes finding the answer easier somehow
You need a webserver which supports rewriting of URLs. Most people perhaps use the apache2 webserver which does supports this. The module for apache doing this is called "mod_rewrite". You probably (depending on your configuration) need to enable it first.
Clean and beautiful URLs are called "smart-urls", for this term makes searching for tutorials, guides and answers much easier.
To make the mod_rewrite work and rewrite your URLs you need to enable the module for your current project/directory and write some rules down.
You can do this within your .htaccess file and for your example it will look something like this:
.htaccess:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^news/([0-9]+)\.?.*$ news.php?id=$1 [NC,L]
This will cause the server internally (and without the user can see) to rewrite something like this:
http://www.foo.de/news/1337.my-awesome-first-newspost
to
http://www.foo.de/news.php?id=1337
Remark: Everything behind the News ID is ignored
As you can see rules are written as regular expressions which enables you to create really flexible rules.
You can also write multiple rules which depend on each other or just become applied one after the other.
I found a page enabling you to test your rules because this is always a bit hard "debugging" when doing it on your server machine:
http://htaccess.madewithlove.be/
How to modify URL such www.mysite.com/dir.php?ID=123
to www.mysite.com/dir/123 without using or involving .htaccess
cause I can't access .htaccess on our server.
If this is your own application and not the standard framework/CMS then you can implement your own rewrite engine in PHP so the URLs would look like www.mysite.com/index.php/dir/123.
That's slightly worse than the clean URLs but that's the best you can achieve.
When you run the url like that the $_SERVER['PATH_INFO'] PHP variable would store "/dir/123" which is then your job to parse and transform to the params you need and then invoke or include the right script.
IIRC Kohana is built like that. So you can look their code for an inspiration.
The only other option is using a rewrite engine on the web server software, e. g. mod_rewrite for Apache.
But as long as you don't even control files on your server, you probably don't have access to Apache configuration.
Your web app/CMS should have support for nice URLs too.
Short story is:
You can't
At least you should be able to use .htaccess to normally do this. If you can't even use that, other options will most probably also be limited out for you.
But there is one work-around that you MAYBE (I'm absolutely not sure) can use...
Are you allowed to set your own 404 error pages?
If so, try setting a 404page.php that acts as your entry point, sends out a http_response_code(200); and does what it further should do.
Off course you should remove any index.php from your public_html and not use any of the URLS that should be handled by the handler, so they will lead you to the 404page.php.
(Let me know if this worked :). )
Does anybody know of a software program that will convert a website built with PHP, JSON and jquery into a mainly HTML format. We need to do a conversion for SEO purposes and don't want to have to rewrite the whole site.
HTML is a language used for markup, PHP is an object oriented functional language. You cannot convert one to the other, I'm sorry.
If you're trying to make sure that you have nothing but .HTML extensions on your public URLs for SEO purposes:
Someone's selling you a line of BS.
You need access to your server configuration.
You don't have to convert anything but your links.
The .PHP extension is the default file extension configured to be sent from Apache to the PHP engine for parsing. You can change what file extension gets parsed in your configuration file.
http://encodable.com/parse_html_files_as_php/
This will allow you to keep .HTM files static and have .HTML files parsed as if they were .PHP files.
Try this: http://www.httrack.com/
It will only return a static HTML site. But it might be a good base for you.
Since the only thing which really knows what type of file you're using is the server itself, it does not really matter what you're using on the back end. Most search engines are smart enough to know that so they don't really care so much. Now, people might care. People might say, "Hm, well, this is .html, that means that this person must have a flat file which is constantly being updated," but I doubt it.
If you're really concerned about having a .html extension, then you can fake it by using htaccess:
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.html$ $1.php [L]
If that is placed in a .htaccess file at the root of your site, it will redirect all requests which end with .html to a corresponding page with .php. It will do that transparently both to the user and to the crawlers.
Of course, every link on your site will need to convert from linking to .php, but it will replace the impossible task of using only .html files with the annoying task of replacing all of your .php links.
As to removing JavaScript, well, you could do that, or you could design your site in such a way that it still uses AJAX but it works with the search engines instead of against them. The biggest trick is to make sure that your site can work with as little AJAX as possible and then use AJAX to supplement. We've come a long way from requiring that all websites work in lynx, but it is still good practice to make sure that they are still sane without the benefit of JS/CSS.
Besides, search engines are getting smarter. Google has been working to read AJAX intelligently since 2009. But even if they weren't, there are plenty of articles out there on using AJAX without hurting SEO.
There is no need to nerf your site because of SEO -- You can have your AJAX and SEO too.
This is hard to accomplish if there is a lot of dynamic data. For a simple website you can just cache every page and make that your new website. I am not sure how useful that would be. For example if you have forms or other user input fields then things will just not work. In any case this is how you do it using wget.
$ wget -m http://www.example.com/
More reading here.
for some days now I have been trying to make a simple mod_rewrite rule to create friendly URLs, my web host have mod_rewrite enabled but I just can't get it to work.
All the next questions where posted by me:
.htacces to create friendly URLs
Friendly URLs with .htaccess
.htacces NOT working…
None of the answers worked, so I'm thinking now using simple php routing instead and I wanted to know if there is a big performance or SEO difference between the two. And if there is, maybe you know how to fix the mod_rewrite problems posted in my questions.
Thanks.
If you're using PHP routing for PHP files only, it would be no problem performance-wise: The interpreter will get started anyway, a new process started, memory allocated etc.
But if you are planning to route requests for static resources like images and style sheets as well, however, don't use PHP routing under any circumstance. It's way too resource-intensive and not what PHP was built for.
I'd say mod_rewrite is the better, leaner solution and it's worth trying to figure it out.
I prefer routing that kicks in when the requested file doesn't exist, like this in Lighttpd:
server.error-handler-404 = "/index.php"
Provided you find out how to do this in Apache, your script would be more cross webserver compatible, since Apache's mod_rewrite conditions in .htaccess won't work on Lighttpd.