Whats the best way to implement mod_rewrite with PHP

[livewire1974]

Hi everybody,
I've finally decided to use mod_rewrite for SEO reasons. I am looking for advise from others that have used it. My situation is as follows, I have a listing page with a large number of products by different companies. To view the product details, I have a link, viewdetails?id=ererferfr4343444, where the ID is a random set of letters and numbers I created when inputting the information.

How do I go about making this link more SEO friendly?


Thanks in advance.

[Jake Arkinstall]

First of all, modify your viewdetails.php file to accept a more user-friendly name in the absense of an ID.

So, for example, the request viewdetails.php?name=someCompany would return the same as viewdetails.php?id=t3ut249tun429tu (where that is the random ID of the same row containing the name someCompany).

Then, in a .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^details/([^/]+)/?$ viewdetails.php?name=$1

Off Topic:

Explaination of the Regular Expression:
If the request starts with "details/", followed by 1 or more of any character apart from "/", with an optional "/" on the end.

[livewire1974]

Thanks for your reply, i still dont really understand this, so, I should have my source link as something like

<a href="viewdetails.php?name=companyname_asdas34r34"? view details </a>

[Jake Arkinstall]

No.

That's just the first step. By implementing the mode rewrite, you'd be using:

<a href="details/companyname">View Details</a>

The reason you allow viewdetails.php to accept a name in the absense of an ID is so that the htaccess file can redirect to it.

[livewire1974]

But, the company name will have many products, so I need to have

<a href="details/companyname_productname">View Details</a> ?

[Jake Arkinstall]

Ah, I see what you mean. In which case you could do

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^details/([^/]+)/?$ viewdetails.php?company=$1
RewriteRule ^details/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/?$ viewdetails.php?company=$1&product=$2

And the url would be:

details/companyname/productname

For normality and the sake of keeping order to a hierarchy, I'd recommend the slash, not the underscore.

[livewire1974]

For normality and the sake of keeping order to a hierarchy, I'd recommend the slash, not the underscore.

Was just about to ask about this

This makes sense now, thats for your help

[Jake Arkinstall]

That's what Sitepoint's here for

Sorry about the confusion, I misread your original post.

[livewire1974]

Oh no, I just ran into an issue, when I do this, my CSS file for the viewdetails page does not load for some reason? When i view the page directly in the address bar its fine, but when using mod_rewrite its not loading ? Any ideas?

[Jake Arkinstall]

Yes. See, now the browser sees the page as in a subdirectory.

What you should do is use an absolute URI rather than a relative one.

[livewire1974]

Cool, I got that, and I use GET to pull the variables or would it be better to grab the full address and then parse it to get my database key ?