How do I setup mydomain.co.uk/username/ folders?

[littlejim84]

Hello everyone. Hope you're all well (and hope someone can help me here!)

I'm working on a project that needs to allow people to type in mydomain.co.uk/username/ as a URL and then this will redirect them to their profile page. I'm using PHP to code the site, so a PHP related solution would be great.

My project is working around profile pages. These profile pages will have stuff on it, related to that username. I was thinking of when a user signs up, my PHP code creates a new folder on the root directory named with the username's username... Then the PHP code will copy a template profile page into this newly created directory...

Would this be a good way of doing it? It'd be nice if these profile pages were search engine friendly too...

Any help at all would be great!

[guido2004]

Look at this thread, and Dachande663 's tip.

[littlejim84]

Ahh, sorry should of done more detailed search before posting...

This mod_rewrite melarky... How does this actually work then? What does it actually do? Also, will using that be search engine friendly? I kind of want these profile pages to be a page of their own (in search engine terms)...

[Dachande663]

In the root of the website you would make a .htaccess file (take care when naming it, the htaccess part is the file extension, there is no filename). Within that file put this:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?username=$1

Then, in the index.php file you can just use $_GET['username'] to select the relevant userdata (don't forget to sanitise it though).

The only downside to a system like this is, if you have say /about or /contact the script will try and load users with that name. You can stop that by modyfying your htaccess file like so:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?username=$1

Now apache will check any requests to see if a file or directory with that name already exists and if so load that instead. And yes, this system is very search engine friendly because as far as the search engine is concerned these are separate pages.

[littlejim84]

Excellent. Thank you very much Dachande663 - that was a great response!

So... With the code you provided... That should do the job right? I will probably use the page "profile.php" and pass "id" to it... So my code in the .htaccess file will be...

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ profile.php?id=$1

Is that correct right? Then on the profile.php I will have $_REQUEST['id']? To validate the ID, I need to check that it matches a username in the database yes? Is there anyother checks I need to do it?

Also, Is there any special requirements for this thing to work? Will I need to contact my hosting company to make sure it supports this type of thing?

Many many thanks again...

[littlejim84]

Just an addtional note... The $1 at the end of that above code... Why is it $1? Where does that 1 come from?

[Dachande663]

littlejim, the $1 comes from the way apache handles mod_rewrite, it basically means the first variable. So if you had two regex's you would then have $1 and $2. Read up on it if you want, you can do amazing things with a dash of m_r.

As for the PHP page, I would normally use $_GET['id'] but request will work. Just remember to sanitise the input in case someone tries an SQL injection attack. This code should help get you started:

<?php
// connect to database here
$username = mysql_real_escape_string($_GET['id']);
// now you can perform a query to get the users data etc
?>

[littlejim84]

Wow... Thanks man... You've been really really helpful. Thanks for steering me in the right direction - I now have a firm grasp and will continue to look up on it.

Thanks again!

[Dachande663]

Ah you're welcome, just glad I could spread the magic of mod_rewrite.

[your.fm]

Just been reading this post and its very very interesting, so doing this in your .htaccess

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ profile.php?id=$1

and then a person types yourdomain.com/yourname it will basicly run yourdomain.com/profile.php?id=yourname with out them knowing so it looks as though your just going to yourdomain.com/yourname?

Many thanks

[BluDragon]

Yes, unless you throw in a redirect ([R]) into the mix.

[your.fm]

What do you mean by

Yes, unless you throw in a redirect ([R]) into the mix.

?

[Dachande663]

If you add an R flag to the rule the browser will recieve a Redirect code in the header, showing that the page has moved. However this harms your search results as it's merely counted a re-direct page, not a full page in itself.

[BluDragon]

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ profile.php?id=$1 [R]

As daschande63 says, not a good idea.

[your.fm]

I wrote the code into my .htaccess

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ profile.php?id=$1

But then when i did mydomain.com/myid i got a 500 Internal Server Error.....Anyone know why this could be??

Many thanks

[Ernie1]

in httpd.conf You should probably uncomment
LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so
and restart the server