I need your help creating some links using mod_rewrite.
I have some pages like:
register.php
login.php
And have the code for them:
RewriteRule ^register/?$ register.php [NC,L]
RewriteRule ^login/?$ login.php [NC,L]
My problem is with "dynamic" links I have since I can't get them working.
For exemple I have links like:
index.php?id=news
índex.php?id=news&article=2
How can I transform those links into:
/news/
/news/article_name
And I have some products (that could have the same name in the same category) but with different ID's like:
índex.php?id=products&p=30
How can I change it to
/products/product-name
After this, is it possible to "generate" an unique name? Since I would like not set in the link the unique ID like products/45342/product-name?
What are the changes I need to make to my code to work with those links?
For example I have links like:
To clarify, you must first change the links in your application to be of the form /news/ or /news/article_name (but see below). You then rewrite these "pretty" URLs back to the underlying filesystem path.
So, to rewrite /news/ back to index.php?id=news you can do something like:
RewriteRule ^(news)/$ index.php?id=$1 [L]
Using the $1 backreference just saves typing. Only use the NC flag if this must be a case-sensitive match, but note that this potentially creates duplicate content, so you must specify the canonical URL in some other way (eg. rel="canonical" link element). For the same reason, only make the trailing slash optional if this is a specific requirement.
However, it's not possible to rewrite /news/article_name back to index.php?id=news&article=2 (I assume that should be i, and not í, as in your question?) since the article ID (ie. 2) is not present in the source URL. You need to include the ID in the source URL (or make the article_name unique and a key in your lookup). It would be more usual to create a URL like /news/2/article_name (which is what StackOverflow does), which can be easily rewritten. The article_name in the URL is purely for users (and indirect SEO). In which case you could rewrite this like so:
RewriteRule ^(news)/(\d+)/ index.php?id=$1&article=$2 [L]
This will rewrite /news/N/<anything> to /index.php?id=news&article=N (where N is 1 or more digits).
However, since it rewrites <anything> you should also implement a redirect in your application when the non-canonical article_name is accessed. (Which again, is what StackOverflow does.)
And I have some products (that could have the same name in the same category) but with different ID's like: índex.php?id=products&p=30
How can I change it to /products/product-name
The same principle as mentioned above applies here also.
After this, is possible to "generate" an unique name?
You can generate this "unique name" in your application, not .htaccess. Build you URLs in your application etc.
Since I would like not set in the link the unique ID like "products/45342/product-name" ?
As mentioned above, either your product-name is unique, and behaves like your id. Or you incorporate the unique ID in the URL - this is the far more common approach, offers greatest flexibility and is less prone to error. A "short" URL like /products/45342 will redirect you to the correct canonical URL.
Related
I have a website which has dynamic URLs and they're not currently prettified. I have re-worked the site and included pretty URLs, but the real dynamic folder structure/filename has also changed.
To better explain, the current dynamic URLs look like
http://example.com/liveguide/year.php?year=2017
The new dynamic url for the same page is
http://example.com/shows/show-list.php?year=2017
I use the following:
RewriteRule ^shows/(199[5-9]|200[0-9]|20[0-1][0-7])/?$ /shows/show-list.php?year=$1 [L]
To enable the use of pretty URLS like
http://example.com/shows/2017
So what I'm trying to do is if anyone followed a link of the original dynamic URL, they'll end up on the new clean URL. So far I've just got
RewriteRule ^liveguide/year.php /shows/show-list.php [R=301,L]
Which redirects to the correct page, but you're left with the ugly URL in the address bar. How could I do it so that the new, pretty URL is in the address bar?
Ie someone visits
http://example.com/liveguide/year.php?year=2017
They end up on, and see in their address bar
http://example.com/shows/2017
You just need to match the query string, which is in a separate variable, and used in a RewriteCond, which capture to %1, %2 etc. Like this:
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^year=(\d{4})$
RewriteRule ^liveguide/year\.php$ /shows/%1? [R=301,L]
While we are here, do you really need to only match just those exact years? Would it matter if /shows/1234 also got rewritten? Probably not, you can just return a 404 from your PHP, so a simpler rule would be ok, like the above just saying any four numbers. It will also work for future years without changing it.
RewriteRule ^shows/(\d{4})/?$ /shows/show-list.php?year=$1 [L]
The goal is usually not to match exactly what you want, and only that, but rather to ensure nothing else (other parts of the site) will be matched that shouldn't be. Simpler rules are easier to maintain and review later. Your script must already be able to handle bad data anyway, so just let it handle the detailed checking without duplicating it unnecessarily.
Hope this helps.
I have an url that looks like:
/platforms.php?platform_id=xxx
where xxx is a number
I'm rewriting the URL inside the php application. So, for example the above url would look like:
/xbox/ or /playstation/
Now in .htaccess I have:
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/$ platforms.php?platform_id=$1 [L,QSA]
However when I go to a platform page the GET url becomes /xbox/ or /playstation/ , instead of xxx.
Any pointers would be appreciated.
Update:
Hi, the link is not relevant to my question. I've tried to reformulate what I am after for in the example bellow with better details.
Thanks for the answer and sorry for the bad explanation.
Yep, when I said GET url I was referring to $_GET["platform_id"] .
Basically I have an URL called
www.example.com/platforms.php?platform_id=1
In the above example $_GET['platform_id'] = 1.
In the actual php aplication I have a function (let's call it make_link ), with which I make the above URL output like:
www.example.com/xbox/ (since 1 is the id of the xbox platform)
Now in httaccess I also need a rewrite rule that will make accessing the URL work.
So I have :
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/$ platforms.php?platform_id=$1 [L,QSA]
This does make the rewrite work in the terms that I can access
www.example.com/xbox/
However on the newly accessed page, if I get $_GET['platform_id'], the value for it is xbox/ .
Thanks,
In a RewriteRule, $1 is a variable backreferencing the first regular expression (in your case: ([^/]+)).
So, whatever text forms that part of your URL is what will be stored in $1.
If you wanted to use the consoles' IDs, you'd have to make these IDs part of your URLs. If you don't want that, but if you want your pretty URLs to reflect the names of the consoles, you'll have to rewrite the query part of platforms.php?platform_id=$1 in your .htaccess file.
Instead of querying for IDs (?platform_id=$1), you'll have to query for the consoles' names, e.g. ?platform_name=$1.
Edit:
In your PHP file, you'd then use $_GET['platform_name']
We run a blog, and really need to tidy up the URLs using htaccess, but I am really stumped.
Example:
Working on a site, and I need to generate search engine friendly URLs
So I have the url currently as:
http://mywebsite.com/blog/read.php?art_id=11
Title of this page is:
Why do Australians pay so much for Cars ?
I need to change it to its corresponding SEF url. like so:
http://mywebsite.com/blog/Why-do-Australians-pay-so-much-for-Cars-?
The question mark is part of the title, and we could remove these if its a issue. Any suggestions please?
Also would prefer to drop the read.php portion. Need to create a rule that works across our entire blog.
They all follow the same pattern, only the art_id number changes.
(Assuming that you're using apache as a webserver)
Take a look at this answer for a very similar question: https://stackoverflow.com/a/8030760/851273
The problem here is that .htaccess and mod_rewrite doesn't know how to map page names to art_id's so there's 2 ways you can try to do this.
You can add some functionality to your read.php so that it can do a similar lookup but instead of art_id, it uses art_title or something. Essentially you'll have to do the backend lookup of a database (or wherever your articles are stored) and use the title as a key instead of the ID. This is a little messy since it's possible to have weird characters in titles such as non-ascii or reserved characters (like ? for instance), so you'll need to create a title encoder and decoder when pulling titles out of the database or when using titles to lookup an article in your database.
If you have access to the server config or vhost config, you may be able to setup a RewriteMap using an outside program (the prg type) and create a php script that does the title-to-ID lookup for you. Then you can create rewrite rules in your .htaccess that does something along the lines of:
RewriteRule ^blog/(.*)$ /blog/read.php?art_id=${title-to-id:$1} [L]
Where you are extracting the article title from your pretty URL, and feeding it through a rewrite map called title-to-id to get the art_id. Again you'll need to setup a title encoder/decoder so your titles will have the non-ascci and reserved characters dealt with.
Another thing that you can do is to stick an article ID in your pretty URLs so they look like this: http://mywebsite.com/blog/11-Why-do-Australians-pay-so-much-for-Cars. This is still pretty easy to see what the link is about, it's SEO friendly, and it bypasses the need to do title-to-ID lookups. The Rewrite Rules would also equally be simpler:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
# add whatever other special conditions you need here
RewriteRule ^blog/([0-9]+)-(.*)$ /blog/read.php?art_id=$1 [L]
And that's it. Of course, you'd have to now generate all of your blog URL's to be of the form: http://(host)/blog/(art_id)-(art_title), and you'd also have to remove special characters from the title, but you don't have to worry about writing additional code to translate titles back to IDs.
I have a problem with query strings. I want to change this...
http://www.audiomasterclass.com/arc.cfm?a=giant-killing-%245-mic-preamp-its-secrets-reveale
To this...
www.audiomasterclass.com/?a=588
Based on this url it can't be done. You need logic to reverse the name to a ID.
What you can do is make sure that in the original url the ID is included. For instance:
http://www.audiomasterclass.com/arc.cfm?a=giant-killing-%245-mic-preamp-its-secrets-reveale
can be changed to: http://www.audiomasterclass.com/588/giant-killing-%245-mic-preamp-its-secrets-reveale
And then use a rewrite rule:
RewriteRule ^/([0-9]+) /arc.cfm?a=$1 [L]
What you do is add the id to every link so you system will on basis of ID but google/users see the nice URL.
You need to change the rewrite rule a bit (for your needs and server config) but it will explain the basics.
This is a totally new area for me so please be patient. I want to create "permalinks" for a dynamic site I am working on. At the moment all the pages (not the index) are referenced using an ID variable thus:
http://www.domainname.com/page.php?ID=122 (etc)
I want to create a suitable rewrite rule so that a useable URL would be more like this:
http://www.domainname.com/page/'pagetitle'.html (could be .php doen't matter)
Page title is stored in the database and obviously is linked directly to the ID
Am I right in thinking thr rewrite rule would be something like this?
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^(([^&]*&)*)ID=([^&]+)(&+(.*))?$
RewriteRule ^page\.php$ /page/%3?%1%5 [L,R=301]
My ideal would be to just create
http://www.domainname.com/'pagetitle'.html
But have absolutly no idea how to do that.
Now the other question/sub question.
If the rewrite works i.e. you type in http://www.domainname.com/page/'pagetitle'.html to a browser address bar does the htaccess file work "the other way" in accessing the page http://www.domainname.com/page.php?ID=122 or do I have to create a function to take the 'pagetitle'.html bit of the URL and convert it to page.php?ID=122 ?
Also, sorry, but this is all new; if I create a site map (xml or php etc) using http://www.domainname.com/page/'pagetitle'.html will the SE spiders go to http://www.domainname.com/page.php?ID=122? or di I need to create the sitemap using the ID variables?
Question 1 and 2:
The condition is not required in this case. Use it like this:
RewriteRule ^/page/([\w-]+).html$ /page.php?title=$1 [L,R=301]
This transforms
/page/blabla.html to /page.php?title=blabla
You need to find the right page using the title parameter in page.php
Question 3:
I suggest you never use the querystring variant of the urls in any of your anchor links or xml sitemap. This way the spiders will only know of the friendly urls.