Question

I am about to attempt writing of a photo sharing script and a script/rewrite that transforms numbers into descriptive names. I have a vague idea on how to go about doing this, so I was looking for some general comments/guidance.

Issue 1: I need to have a URL source for a photo which is stored above my root directory. I plan on appending the photo name (which is stored in my database) to my url as a query string, such as: http://www.mywebsite.com/getphoto.php?12_3.jpg and then writing a php script (getphoto.php) which takes the portion after the ‘?’ and gets that photo from above the root.

Does this make sense and would there be any things to consider?

Issue 2: I want to transform a number at the end of my URL to a descriptive name (ie typing in facebook.com/4 displays facebook.com/zuck). I am not really sure the best way to go about doing this and was hoping for some guidance to get going in the right direction.

Thanks!

Answer 1

For Issue 1: a simple rewrite can handle that, you need to use the [QSA] flag. Something like this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^.*\.(jpeg|jpg|gif|png|bmp)$
RewriteRule ^(.+)$ /getphoto.php?photo=$1 [L,QSA]

This will rewrite behind the scenes the url http://mywebsite.com/12_3.jpg to http://mywebsite.com/getphoto.php?photo=12_3.jpg Note that the 3rd rewrite condition wants the URI to end with an image extension, you may not need it.

For Issue 2, it depends on how something like “4” maps to “zuck”. If you are going to hardcode them into your apache config, you can use a RewriteCond:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/4$
RewriteRule ^.*$ /zuck [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/5$
RewriteRule ^.*$ /mark [L]

etc. (or replace [L] with [R,L] to redirect instead of rewrite, or alternatively just use Redirect)

Redirect /4 /zuck
Redirect /5 /mark

etc.

If the mapping is stored in a database, your going to need to do this dynamically, perhaps as a php script to do a redirect, utilizing something similar to Issue 1. The rewrite rule would rewrite to something like /redirect.php?id=$1 and your redirect.php script would take the id and do a database lookup to see where to redirect the browser.