Question

WordPress uses friendly seo url without using htaccess.

Can any explain this to me please how they do it.

The only way i can think of is to do something like this.

domain.com/index.php/nnn/mmmm/

But wordpress does not use index.php

I know they are not using htaccess.

Please let me know.

Thank you.

Answer 1

WordPress actually has a single .htaccess file that they don’t need to change which redirects all requests to index.php

index.php then looks at the permalinks rules and runs a few database queries to determine which page to send you.

So for instance if the permalink rule is %postdate%/%postname% (may not be the actual WordPress permalink variables. I haven’t been using WordPress for too long) then it would just use regular expressions (or combinations of substr() and strpos()) to put %postdate% and %postname% into variables. Next it runs a simple database query for any item matching that date and that name. If nothing is found, redirect to search. If you find more than one, list them all (like a category page). If you find one and only one, send that page.

As far as actually “sending” the page, that’s just a matter of settings certain variables (such as $the_post['content']) and then include()‘ing the proper theme file.

include()‘ing the theme file is a simple if() statement.

if(file_exists("wp-content/themes/<your_theme>/$the_post['type'].php")){
    include("wp-content/themes/<your_theme>/$the_post['type'].php");
} else {
    include("wp-content/themes/<your_theme>/index.php");
}

Mind you these aren’t the exact variable names or the exact functions as they occur. This is just a very simplified version to give the general idea of how these systems work.