Luca Biagini | Marketing, Adv, Communication & Webdesign

Php, MySql, .htaccess: friendly urls
Published on March 26, 2008

There are a lot of tutorials that show how to change an address like:

into others like:

In this article I’d like to go one step forward and to create something like:

How-To and Contraindications

Switching from an address like the first one to the secon ones is search engine necessary, because SE spiders often don’t crawl correctly our dynamic urls. Switching to the third ones is much better, because it’s a search engine friendlier, and it’s human friendly too.

Now, I think we all agree that we should change our dynamic urls into the last ones, but the goal is to make it without modifying, or at least without modifying too heavily our web application. If our php script works with a query for product_id, and product_id is the unique, autoincremental key of our mysql database, we have to rewrite our urls without losing the possibility for our script to work in its original way.

That is the way Wordpress works: a function that allows the user to choose the preferred format for the urls. In this tutorial, we replicate – in a very simplier way – that tool.

How the system works

My solution – with downloadable example – uses php and mysql to manage the content and create the urls, and Apache’s server mod_rewrite module to rewrite the addresses. We assume to be on a linux server and that our app is php and mysql based.

We have 2 tables in our mysql db:

News table contains the articles, with the columns id, title, article and slug, where slug contains the sanityzed title, that is a title like: “That’s an easy mod_rewrite tutorial” becomes “thats-an-easy-mod-rewrite-tutorial”.
The script, normally, queries the db for the id, but we, through php, will find the related slug. Then we rewrite the url through mod_rewrite.

Options table contains id, name and value of the options, that is, in this example, permalinks yes/no. If permalinks are off, php will query the db for the id, and the url format will be: index.php?id=x. If permalinks are on, php will query mysql for the slug, and mod_rewrite will rewrite the url in format: rewritten-url-with-php-and-mod-rewrite.

Example

A working example is available at:
gruppomodulo.it/lavori/esempi/mod-rewrite-php-htaccess-tutorial/

Also downloadable in .zip format at:
gruppomodulo.it/lavori/esempi/mod-rewrite-php-htaccess-tutorial/ex.zip

Example includes following files:

8 Responses to “Php, MySql, .htaccess: friendly urls”

  1. 1 victor said at 5:56 pm on May 20th, 2008

    Excelent Tuto!!!

    Amazing, clean explication!
    i´ll hope works for me,

    Thanks

  2. 2 Tom said at 8:52 pm on August 11th, 2008

    This is a great alternative to the way I was going about this previously.

    Quick Question… Do you have a function that will sanitize the titles to input the appropriate slugs?

  3. 3 Tom said at 6:18 am on August 12th, 2008

    Do you know of a way to sanitize the title to create an appropriate slug?

  4. 4 Luca said at 6:56 am on August 12th, 2008

    Hi Tom,

    I’ve written several functions to do that, but in the end I’ve decided that the built-in one in wordpress is better. I’ll write a post in the next weeks. Meanwhile, I suggest you to use their function.

    Download wordpress, open wp-includes/formatting.php and clone/edit the following functions:

    - sanitize_title_with_dashes
    - remove_ accents
    - seems_utf8
    - utf8_ uri_encode

  5. 5 Tom said at 4:18 pm on August 13th, 2008

    Thank you sir. I found these functions on another site as well and I will look into them. Sorry about the double post, I didn’t realize your comments were moderated :) . You have been very helpful!

  6. 6 Zetman said at 1:56 am on May 10th, 2009

    Hi I found in others sites only instruction but not examples, thanks for this, very helpul

  7. 7 Stone said at 1:05 am on July 21st, 2009

    Hi,
    great example. Is it possible to have more types of php files? E.g. not only single.php but also gallery.php, news.php and so on?

    The rewrite rule seems to send everything to single.php…

  8. 8 Luca said at 10:56 am on July 22nd, 2009

    Hi Stone,

    what do you mean with everything is redirected to single.php?

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