Handling an URL before it hits a page?

PHP
1

I’m working on a customer’s website after he had some run-ins with the old designer, so I’m basically picking up someone else’s work.

It appears to be working on PHP + MySQL (CMS-like) called “tse”. The client has his own control panel but the control panel appears to be tailored specifically to the customer’s needs. IE, he can only edit the pages, and each edit page is specifically made for that page. With all the appropriate forms (ie, adding a new player, he adds age/height/etc). It doesn’t appear to editable besides that. This suggests that there’s some “higher” control panel - so to speak. That this control panel was made for him.

Anyway, I can’t find that control panel, if it even exists, but normally that wouldn’t be bugging me - what is bugging me is the following:

The urls that are processed by the website appear to be going through some sort of ghost-processor. I mean, ***.com/contact.eng.html doesn’t even exist as a page. Only contact.html exists, and that’s just the “body” of the contact page. It’s an HTML file which appears to be used by some include(contact.html) function because it contains some php, but not enough for the page to survive by itself. It doesn’t include anything else in the headers.

Anyway, I don’t know how to go about finding which page processes the URL first. Is there any way someone could help me? How does is some ghost entity getting a hold of URLs before they are even processed by the page that they’re pointing at?

Any help is appreciated. I’m completed lost on this…

Update… found this in .htaccess in the root folder

AddDefaultCharset utf-8
AddType application/x-httpd-php .js
DirectoryIndex index.php
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.+\\.html|.*/|)$		/main_index.php	[L,E=PAGE:$1,NS]
ErrorDocument 404 /404.html

There doesn’t appear to be an index.php in the root folder though…

Edit 2:

Of course now after searching for like an hour I make a post and then I stupidly find /main_index.php

Anyway, hopefully this will serve as a beacon for people experiencing the same problem

2

Hi,
a lot of CMS systems run everything through one page and use .htaccess to put everything in the right place and hide the actual index page. Drupal for example manages to hide index.php and instead forwards you to whatever page you are calling from the database resulting in a shorter url eg something like www.example.com/index.php?page=hello would become www.example/hello as it hides the index.php and just picks up the variable value to query the database.

You’ll most likely find a folder called templates (maybe in a subfolder called theme or something similar) which then has the page layout that is used when the database query returns the page information.

If you look at the database behind the site you’ll probably find a table that holds all the page information, probably broken down into different fields one of which may be the url variable. The page template then stitches it all together using the variable it picks up from the url.

Hope that helps