Question

I am developing a site on Codeigniter 2.0.2 . Its a site where companies/users can signup and create their own profile page, have their own custom url(like http://facebook.com/demouser), have their own feedback system, display their services.

This said, I have been successful in display the profile page in the following format

http://mainwebsite.com/company/profile/samplecompany
This displays the home page for the company samplecompany , where company is the controller and profile is the method.

Now I have few questions,

1. I guess it is possible to create to have/get http://mainwebsite.com/samplecompany using htaccess and a default controller. If anybody can help with the htaccess rule , that would be awesome. I am already using htacess to remove index.php from CI but could not get this working.

2. There will be few other pages for the given user/company such as feedback, contact us, services etc. So the implementation links that come to my mind is of the form
   `
   http://mainwebsite.com/company/profile/samplecompany/feedback or
   http://mainwebsite.com/samplecompany/feedback

http://mainwebsite.com/company/profile/samplecompany/services or
http://mainwebsite.com/samplecompany/services

http://mainwebsite.com/company/profile/samplecompany/contactus or
http://mainwebsite.com/samplecompany/contactus


wheresamplecompany` is the dynamic part
Is it possible to create site links in the format?

1. I understand using A record for a given domain, I can point a domain say, http://www.samplecompany.com to http://mainwebsite.com/company/profile/samplecompany so typing http://www.samplecompany.com he should be taken to http://mainwebsite.com/company/profile/samplecompany . If this is successfully implemented, will
   http://www.samplecompany.com/feedback
   http://www.samplecompany.com/services
   http://www.samplecompany.com/contactus

work correctly?

Answer 1

I guess it is possible to create to have/get http://mainwebsite.com/samplecompany using htaccess and a default controller. If anybody can help with the htaccess rule , that would be awesome. I am already using htacess to remove index.php from CI but could not get this working.
There will be few other pages for the given user/company such as feedback, contact us, services etc. So the implementation links that come to my mind is of the form ` http://mainwebsite.com/company/profile/samplecompany/feedback or http://mainwebsite.com/samplecompany/feedback

You can accomplish this using routes. For example, in your /config/routes.php file, put this:

$route['samplecompany'] = "company/profile/samplecompany";
$route['samplecompany/(:any)'] = "company/profiles/samplecompany/$1";

The first rule tells CodeIgniter that when someone accesses http://mainwebsite.com/samplecompany that it should process it as if the URL were “company/profile/samplecompany”. The second rule captures anything that comes in the URI string after “samplecompany” and appends it onto the end.

However, if you have multiple companies(not just samplecompany), you’re probably going to want to extend CI’s router to suppor this unless you want to manually edit the config file each time a new company is added.

OK, you’re definitely going to want to handle dynamic company names(as per your comment). This is a little trickier. I can’t give you the full code, but I can point you in the right direction.

You’ll want to extend CI’s router and on an incoming request query the DB for the list of company names. If the URI segment matches a company name, you’ll want to serve it up using your company/profile method. If it does not, you will ignore it and let CI handle it normally. Check out this post on this topic for more information: forum link.