[enchen]

Hi does anyone know of a method for rewriting a URL without using Apache's mod_rewrite.

I would like to change my URL's in the browser's address bar from:

domain.com/index.php?choice=something&variable1=value1

Sometimes also:

index.php?choice=something&variable1=value1&variab le2=value2

To the more friendly looking:

domain.com/something/value1.html

Or even better:

domain.com/something/title_of_value1.html

I thought maybe this could be done by creating a rewrite function in the php header of the index file or similar...

So when somebody calls for domain.com/something/title_of_value1.html , this function would read the URL and decode it to the rest of the page in order for it to collect the correct values from mySQL etc.

Any help is greatly appreciated!!!

[nekeno12]

No. It has to be interpreted though mod_rewrite.

The problem is, when you try and request domain.com/something/title_of_value1.html without using mod_rewrite, apache automatically sends back a 404 error.

Now, you could have your 404 page be a 404.php page, that interprets the url and parses what it needs to, but that's not really URL friend or search engine friendly, because a 404 error still gets sent back.

So, search engines will never index the page with this method, making it totally useless.

Mod_rewrite is not that hard. You can use it in the .htaccess file in the same directory as the php file.

Here's a rule generator:
http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/mod...enerator.shtml

[enchen]

The problem is that my host hasn't enabled mod_rewrite on their server, which leaves me without any options I suppose...

[arstanj]

Originally Posted by enchen

The problem is that my host hasn't enabled mod_rewrite on their server, which leaves me without any options I suppose...

I'd use .htaccess file to do that. Go do some googling. I'm sure you'll find a lot of answers.

Happy coding!

[enchen]

Originally Posted by enchen

The problem is that my host hasn't enabled mod_rewrite on their server, which leaves me without any options I suppose...

Found this great tutorial which seams to solve my problem

PHP alternative to mod_rewrite

My only concern is that the search engines might get a redirect call 30*somthing* or a 404 when visiting the URL's.
Anyone got a clue if I should be worried or not

[nekeno12]

Yes. We tried the same method and I described it above. The search engines will see in the header response that it's not a 200OK. They won't cache or index that page.

[nekeno12]

If your host doesn't have mod_rewrite. Just try and limit your query stings in PHP. We use one PHP $_GET variable on one of our sites and we have over 1000 pages indexed in Google.

http://www.site.com/?content=Foo%20Bar

This url does index well in google and the others

[enchen]

Thanks for all your feedback....

I'll try to shorten the string and hope they'll add the Apache module not to long into the future...

Anyway, I checked the access.log in Apache and it seams that when running the alternative method described in the tutorial above you will get a 200 OK
return from the server. At least on a Apache 2.0.xx server, I've not tested it
on 1.3.xx yet. Any feedback on that would be appreciated

Code:

127.0.0.1 - - [22/Sep/2005:16:29:11 +0200] "GET /website/en/index/apartments/page/12 HTTP/1.1" 200 20821