Question

I have an iframe to embed audio which points to a src like this…

http://domain.com/embed/mediaID

At the embed level I have an index.php listening to GET requests but it will of course never get the requests unless I do some sort of redirect in my .htaccess like so…

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^([^/]*)$ index.php?var1=$1 [L]

That accounts for the path schema so I can point to a mediaID like that but this is unscalable in that I can’t easily add more GET params.

I’m seeing that YouTube & Vimeo point to a mediaID but then also allow GET params thereafter.

My understanding is that a rewrite is the way to go for this but perhaps I’m mistaken. I definitely would rather pass the mediaID as a GET param and skip writing each param I’ll ever use in the .htaccess but that is not the way YouTube & Vimeo have gone, they seem to have found a scalable way to do it.

Why is their approach of pointing to the mediaID better than passing the url as a GET? I take it their approach is good practice, perhaps I’m assuming to much.

What is the best way to accomplish a direct link to a media ID and retain the GET params in a scalable way.

Answer 1

If you want to retain the existing query string after your rewrite, just use the QSA flag on your rule:

RewriteRule ^([^/]*)$ index.php?var1=$1 [QSA,L]

Then, in addition to var1, you’ll receive whichever parameters were passed in as part of the original request.