Question

The page http://www.dayscore.net generates a user-specific key which is appended to the URL and then could be used as a simple authentification-method.

Sadly I wasn’t able to find how this could work and if it is possible to build something like this on my webspace. I read about .htaccess redirecting but it was mostly about simply redirecting a page from A to B.

What I want to do is the following:

• The user calls the URL http://www.mywebsite.com/foobar
• It redirects internally to http://www.mywebsite.com/index.php
• In index.php it is possible to find out that the user called foobar and do something according to this input
• The redirection is just internal, the user still sees http://www.mywebsite.com/foobar in his address bar

Is this comparable to the mechanic DayScore implemented?
How would it be possible to implement such a webpage (.htaccess?) ?

Answer 1

You may try this inside one .htaccess file in the root directory:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI}  /([^/]+)/?$  [NC]
RewriteRule .*   index.php?key=%1  [L]

Maps silently

http://www.mywebsite.com/val

To

http://www.mywebsite.com/index.php?key=val

Where key is any fixed key name and val is a variable value in the incoming URL.

/val must be the last string in the incoming URL for the rules to work.

The key is what the script gets with $_GET['key'] in index.php.