Question

I have asked a similar question before but got no answer.

Whenever we request an address like http://facebook.com/Username, the timeline of username is shown. I think that they have configured their 404 Custom error page in a way that they store the request path (in this case /Username) in a variable and then display the related data. Or have they created a directory with every username in their root directory? That means a billion sub-directories in their root directories?

I want to implement a similar functionality in my website, currently I am passing parameters in URL and accessing them using $_GET.

Answer 1

This is a very common pattern on the web. The term is called URL rewriting. I’ve never done it in PHP, but I suspect this is done via the mod_rewrite module in Apache.

http://www.cyberdesignz.com/blog/website-design/url-rewriting-top-5-ways-of-php-url-rewriting/

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_rewrite.html