Question

I am working on a web portal (PHP/MYSQL) which have 3 sections photos, videos, articles. Each section has its own submission form using which user will submit photos, videos or articles corresponding to their accounts.

So, that URLS which I thought should be like

• http://example.com/
• http://example.com/about/
• http://example.com/contact/
• http://example.com/help/
• http://example.com/photos/
• http://example.com/photos/browse/
• http://example.com/photos/submit/
• http://example.com/photos/edit/

etc.

Same as for videos and articles sections. Now I am confused here to what to use.

• Should I use .htaccess to create such type of URLs?
• Or I should use folders with index.php in it for /photos/ or /photos/browse/ like this. All folders will have index.php so they will be accessed by folder names and URL will look like this http://example.com/photos/browse/
• Or I should go traditionally and use photos.php and browse-photos.php . But this method not looks good and organized.

I can achieve this by htaccess easily but some peoples says that it will slow down your site, because it will process htaccess every time a URL will be requested.

I have one more question, how the sites like digg, flickr does this URL formation. These are pretty big site with millions of page-views a day, so are they not using htaccess?

Please guide me!

Thanks.

Answer 1

I can achieve this by htaccess easily but some peoples says that it will slow down your site, because it will process htaccess every time a URL will be requested.

For very, very, very high-traffic sites it is indeed important to see that there are not too many regex-based rewrite rules because they are somewhat performance intensive.

Most of us don’t need to worry, though. Go with Apache.