Question

I have a social network that allows users to write blogs and ask questions. I am wanting to create dynamic URLs that post the title of the blog or question on the end of the URL via PHP.

Example:

www.blah.com/the_title_here

Looking for the cleanest most efficient way to accomplish this.

Answer 1

You would usually store the URL-friendly “slug” in the database row, and then have a PHP script that finds posts matching that slug.

For example, if you have a script called index.php that took a parameter called slug…

<?php
if (isset($_GET['slug'])) {
    $sql = "SELECT * FROM `your_table` WHERE slug = ? LIMIT 1";
    $smt = $pdo->prepare($sql);
    $smt->execute(array($_GET['slug']));
    $row = $smt->fetchObject();
    // do something with the matching record here...
}
else {
    // display home page
}

…You could then re-write requests using .htaccess:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.+)$ index.php?slug=$1