On WebReference.com today Ryan Butler has written up a tutorial of a simple search feature that can be integrated into any site (with their content in a MySQL database).

In this article, you'll learn how to create a searchable form feature that will query a database table and display current staff member information. During the analysis you'll learn how to do the following: create a database table that will hold current staff listings, create a search form and use PHP, in coordination with Structured Query Language (SQL) to capture information entered by the visitor and append the information to display the results we want to show.

They give you the files for the project and work through each, showing how to make the database, put information in and connect to the database to run the query. He opts for the LIKE functionality in the WHERE clause to find the term as a wildcard in the FirstName field. It's not the most efficient, but it can be useful.

There's a quick post on the bla.st blog about a handy method to create "pretty URLs" for your website without changing your code (much). With this example, it's all about Apache and mod_rewrite.

For our bla.st project, we decided to put all URLs through a single PHP script, and process them there. The advantage is then we can do what ever we want with the URLs.

They provide the settings and directives that you'll need to drop into Apache and what they're doing so you can customize them to your site. There's even a brief PHP example at the end showing how to get the information from the URL and into a usable form.