Question

I am not a PHP developer at heart and I have been asked to perform some SEO on an existing PHP website.

The first thing I noticed was the ugly URLs so I want to get these to rewrite to something more informative. Here are all the possible patterns:

/index.php?m=ModuleType&categoryID=id
/index.php?m=ModuleType&categoryID=id&productID=id
/index.php?page=PageType
/index.php?page=PageType&detail=yes

So basically what I want to do is convert these into something like:

/ModuleType/Category
/ModuleType/Category/ProductName
/Page
/Page

I haven’t used mod_rewrite before any advice or examples would be great!

Thanks.

Answer 1

mod_rewrite would rather be used to do the opposite: rewrite requests of /ModuleType/Category/ProductName internally to /index.php?m=ModuleType&categoryID=id&productID=id. Using the new URLs in the documents is the job of your application.

---

Edit    Here’s an example of how a function might look like that turns your parameterized URLs into the new ones:

function url($url, $rules) {
    $url = parse_url($url);
    parse_str($url['query'], $url['query']);
    $argNames = array_keys($url['query']);
    foreach ($rules as $rule) {
        if ($rule[0] == $url['path'] && array_keys($rule[1]) == $argNames) {
            $newUrl = $rule[2];
            foreach ($rule[1] as $name => $pattern) {
                if (!preg_match('/'.addcslashes($pattern, '/').'/', $url['query'][$name], $match)) {
                    continue 2;
                }
                $newUrl = str_replace('<'.$name.'>', $match[0], $newUrl);
            }
            return $newUrl;
        }
    }
    return $url;
}

$rules = array(
    array(
        '/index.php',
        array('m'=>'.*', 'categoryID'=>'.*', 'productID'=>'.*'),
        '/<m>/<categoryID>/<productID>'
    )
);
echo '<a href="' . url('/index.php?m=ModuleType&categoryID=categoryID&productID=productID', $rules) . '">/ModuleType/Category/ProductName</a>';