Question

I currently have an entire website running on PHP & GET variables.

My links look like this at present

 http://www.example.co.uk/brochure.php?cat_path=24

And occasionally it has a second variable in the url…

I actually would like my URLs to look like this:
http://www.example.co.uk/Concrete_Fence_Posts

So my questions is simply, how do I go about rewriting urls without breaking my GET variables.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Assuming your parameters are always named cat_path and product_id (if it exists) you can do something like this:

RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/([\d+])$         $1.php?cat_path=$2
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/([\d+])/([\d+])$ $1.php?cat_path=$2&product_id=$3

Your URLs would then be in one of these formats:

pagename/cat_path
pagename/cat_path/product_id

For example:

http://www.bentinckfencing.co.uk/brochure/24
http://www.bentinckfencing.co.uk/product/35/54

Edit: I see you want to use product names in the URL. In that case, your PHP scripts will need to be able to take a name as a parameter and look up the ID. You should continue to accept the ID directly so as to not break existing links. Then your rewrite rule would look like this:

RewriteRule ^([^.]+)$         brochure.php?name=$1

And http://www.bentinckfencing.co.uk/Concrete_Fence_Posts would rewrite to http://www.bentinckfencing.co.uk/brochure.php?name=Concrete_Fence_Posts.