Question

I have seen in WordPress, when you create a page say “Register”, it points to http://example.com/register/ but without having a folder named register in the root at all. How is this done?

Its like this. When a user clicks the link on http://example.com/index.php which says Register, it takes the user to a new page and the URL in the browser would be http://example.com/register/ and the page loads. The register folder itself does not exist.

From the answers below I learnt that the request is passed through the index.php by modifying the .htaccess

I want to know what code to place in index.php so that http://example.com/register/ would display the register page.

Answer 1

In my WordPress .htaccess file I have:

    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
    RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

Which basically says if the “filename” part of the URL doesn’t exist as a file !-f or exist as a directory !-d then rewrite the request internally to be /index.php which forces the request to be processed by index.php of WordPress.

Ok, based on your additional comments, the following .htaccess rules will take http://domain.com/<anything> and internally rewrite it to http://domain.com/index.php?page=<anything>, this will be done without regard to case (NC flag) and will keep (pre-pend) any existing query string (QSA flag). This only does this for filenames and directories that do not exist on the server.

    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php?page=$1 [NC,QSA,L]

This does have the following side effect which you should be able to handle programmatically, http://domain.com/register/ will be rewritten to http://domain.com/index.php?page=register/ which includes the trailing “/” since this is a directory reference. Again, you should be able to handle that in your PHP code.