Question

I’m at few hours looking a various tuts on mod_rewriting, but anything I try myself never seems to work. What I’m hoping for is that I can give you guys the URL model, and get a working Rule and a breakdown of that Rule in return (I’m reasonably familiar with regex). That way I can adapt to future requirements also.

The structure is:
domain.com/contents/page.php?id=123&u=page-slug

What I want is for the user to type:
domain.com/page-slug
and be successfully redirected to the page in question.

From what I have read, this shouldn’t affect PHP GET’s – is this correct? Even if the id isn’t actually in the address bar (obv. question, but I’m completely new to this)? It’s surprising what tutorials leave out…

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

If the ID is necesary then it will need to be present in the pretty url i.e. something like domain.com/page-slug/page-id.

To rewrite this to page.php add the following to your .htaccess in the root directory of domain.com as below

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /

#if not a file or a directory
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
# rewrite requests of the form domain.com/page-slug/123
RewriteRule ^([-a-zA-Z0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/?$ contents/page.php?id=$2&u=$1 [NC,L,QSA]

If you want to learn more see this list of .htaccess and mod_rewrite resources on the web