Question

I am working on a social networking site. Something that I would like to do is have the user’s username come after my websites name… like example.com/myusername. I know I could do something using $_GET variables where it would look like example.com/?u=myusername, but we think that having just the username after after the domain would look cleaner and be easier for users to navigate.

Thanks in advance,

JS

Answer 1

You can setup a rewrite rule to direct all non-existent requests to your index.php (or really whatever script you want to use). Then just inspect the $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] and pull out the username.

Here’s a basic set of rewrite rules (for apache):

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -s [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -l [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule ^.*$ - [NC,L]
RewriteRule ^.*$ index.php [NC,L]

And in your case:

$requestParts = explode('/', $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
$username = $requestParts[0];

That would allow you to also use: example.com/username/posts/newest, and pull out the various ‘parts’.