Question

I’m developing my first decent-sized PHP site, and I’m a bit confused about what the “right way” (assuming there ever is such a thing) to handle clean/friendly/pretty URLs in the application.

The way I see it, there are two main options (I’ll use a simplified social news site as an example):

1. Use mod_rewrite to handle all potential URLs. This would look similar, but not identical, to the following:

RewriteRule ^article/?([^/]*)/?([^/]*)/?([^/]*) /content/articles.php?articleid=$1&slug=$2
RewriteRule ^users/?([^/]*)/?([^/]*) /content/users.php?userid=$1&username=$2
RewriteRule ^search/?([^/]*)/? /content/search.php?query=$1

2. Pass everything to some handler script and let it worry about the details:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule (.*) handler.php?content=$1

Clearly this is all untested “air code,” but you get the point.

• Is one of these two ways going to be seriously slower than the other? Presumably the mod_rewrite is slower, since I’ll be forced to use .htaccess files for this.
• Are there serious disadvantages to either of these approaches?
• Is there a “best practice” for this sort of thing, or is it something that each developer tends to decide for themselves? I know WordPress uses option two (though it was more trouble than it was worth when I investigated exactly how they did it).

Answer 1

Option 1 (.htaccess and several .php files) was often used “in the past” ; now, I see option 2 (every request going through one .php file) used a lot more.

The main advantages I see with option 2 are :

• you can add / modify any kind of URL without having to change any physical file like .htaccess
  • which means the format of the URLs can be configured in the admin section of your application, for example
• you only have one entry point to your PHP code.
  • which means everything goes though index.php : if you need some code executed for all requests, put it there, and you’re sure it’ll always be executed.
  • That’s used a lot with MVC frameworks, for instance.

A couple of years ago, I would have gone with option 1 ; now that I use MVC and Frameworks, I always go with option 2.