Question

I am running PHP5.3.6 and IIS7. I am currently working on a product centric site where I have one php page that dynamically generates a page based on a query string such as /product.php?id=12345.

The volume of products that I have in the database varies, but measures in the hundreds. They have unique IDs and names.

I want for each page to be addresses by their name instead of by the query string.

For example, instead of:

/product.php?id=12345

I would prefer:

/acme-super-widget-in-blue-with-cool-groovy-gadget-attachment

I have the URL Rewrite component in IIS7, but I don’t want to enter values manually. I would rather have a dynamic process in place. I believe the needed functionailty here is to add an URL Rewrite rule to the web.config file, but I’m not sure if that is true or the best approach.

Thank you.

Answer 1

I would recommend using the ID along with the name so that you can support products with the same name (future proofing), or products with non-ascii characters… should you have international names. I would also recommend using only ascii characters in the URL’s for now as I’ve noticed some sites and browser tend to expand non-ascii characters in to ugly percent encoding.

IIS 7 is a bit trickier than Apache, but I think this might work for you http://blogs.iis.net/bills/archive/2008/05/31/urlrewrite-module-for-iis7.aspx

Here is an example rewrite rule which will strip the name off the id and pass just the id to the script.

IIS 7 Using the module in the link above

Match URL

^([0-9]+)[^/]*/?$

Action

index.php?id={R:1} [QSA,L]

Apache just for good messure 😉

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^([0-9]+)[^/]*/?$ index.php?id=$1 [QSA,L]

Here is a PHP function that will generate the id name portion of your friendly URLs.

function friendlyURL($id, $title) {

    $string = $title;
    $paramcount = func_num_args();
    for ($i = 2; $i < $paramcount; $i++) {
        $string .= "-" . func_get_arg($i);
    }
    $string = preg_replace('`&(amp;)?#?[a-z0-9]+;`i', '-', $string);
    $string = htmlentities($string, ENT_COMPAT, "utf-8");
    $string = preg_replace("`&([a-z]+);`i", "", $string);
    $string = preg_replace("`['\[\]]`", "", $string);

    $tmp = $string;
    $string = preg_replace(array("/[^A-Za-z0-9]/", "`[-]+`"), "-", $string);

    $string = trim($string, '-');
    return trim($id . "-" . $string, '-');
}

This would give you URL’s like

Product ID = 12345, Name = “acme super widget”

/12345-acme-super-widget/

Product ID = 12345, Name = “Japanese product ギター”

/12345-japanese-product/