Question

In a site I’m developing I have a page that presents a post based on the variable in the url:
http://www.mywebsite.com?id=18
So this would load the post who’s ID is 18 in the mySQL database.

I would like the create the same effect, but with the url being something like:
http://www.mywebsite.com/articles/title-of-article-18/

Would there be a way to create these pages on the fly with dynamic post content, where the url would originally be created by:
"http://www.mywebsite.com/articles/" + postTitle

Answer 1

You are looking for mod_rewrite and rewriting of urls via htaccess.

What it does is it takes patterns from your url, and the htaccess file detects the pattern redirects that to http://www.mywebsite.com?id=18. Users still see the nice url.

The directory /articles/title-of-article-18/ will not actually exist, and the user never really reaches that location because the htaccess secretly changes the url that the server processes.

See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rewrite_engine

or a random tutorial I found:
http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/htaccess-mod_rewrite-ultimate-guide/