This has been covered before, but I was just setting up a new force type on our servers and thought I would mention it for the fun of it. You see lots of stuff about using mod_rewrite to make friendly URLs or SEO friendly URLs. But, if you are using PHP (and I guess other Apache modules) you can do it without mod_rewrite.

There's three steps to the process - adding the directive to your Apache config, making the script able to handle the request, avoiding duplication of content and returning a 404 error when there's no matching data.

You might have noticed that Digg has a cool way of maintaining clean URLs. Digg actually uses LAMP - Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP. But where are the .php extensions? The answer is here. 4 steps to implement your own Digg style clean URLs.

His method turns on Apache's rewrite engine (you do have mod_rewrite enabled, don't you?) and adds a rule to push all of the requests to two default PHP files. There's also a ForceType method that can be used to achieve the same effect. One .htaccess file later, you're in business and the PHP script only needs to access the $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] value to get the parameters.

One of the major reasons for using a server-side language such as PHP is for the ability to generate dynamic content. Often this will lead to single scripts that produce their content based on the input parameters (that is, the variables in the URL).

This article covers various techniques and methods for representing these parameters in the URL in a clean and "friendly" manner, as well as then how to read the parameters.

They start off with some examples of what they look like, and move right into how to use the Apache mod_rewrite functionality to take in the URL parameters and map them back to a PHP script. They also use the ForceType keyword in Apache to get the server to parse the URL string correctly. They then wrap it all up with the creation of a custom 404 page to handle the errors that might come up, and a summary of the whole project...]]> Wed, 11 Jan 2006 07:03:54 -0600