Question

I recently posted a question about creating vanity URLs on my site and while I got many great answers, I am curious to see what was wrong with my original idea:

Here is the problem:
I currently have ugly URLs that look like this:
http://www.hikingsanfrancisco.com/hiker_community/hiker_public_profile.php?community_member_id=2

What I want is something elegant like this:
http://www.hikingsanfrancisco.com/alex-genadinik

What my proposed solution is:
Can I just store “alex-genadinik” in the database (instead of MVC controllers) and fetch the vanity URL when look up the person. And then I could redirect to the elegant-looking domain?

Or will the redirection add a level of technical-awkwardness and inflexibility? Maybe I wouldn’t have to redirect at all. I mean I’d be looking things up in the db instead of the server. I think thats the only difference. Thoughts? 🙂

Answer 1

There’s nothing wrong with your proposed solution. In fact WordPress can be configured to do exactly this.

I would implement it as follows (similar to WordPress):

1. Have an .htaccess file catch all
   non-existant files that are
   requested, and rewrite to your
   router.php
2. Have your router.php
   check the for this non-existant path
   in your db, against a list of pre-calculated vanity names.
3. If it exists, display the
   relevant information, if not return
   a set of 404 headers to show that neither the file or the vanity name exist.

URL Rewriting Guide