Something that is really confusing me is how sites have urls such as:
-and-
Originally, I thought you could simply just create a php file and use URL rewrite in the .htaccess. For example:
Clearly, this is not the case as not only is it not efficient for more trailing slashes, but CMS's such as Wordpress automatically generate the content for the 'dynamic' URLs, and then redirect to a 301 page if the URL is not recognised.
I am wanting to implement this into my site, I'm just completely clueless on how I'd approach this. I am struggling to research deep into the topic due to myself being unaware what this system actually is. Obviously, I'm looking at this completely wrong, which is causing me to confuse myself.
If someone could explain to what this system is called, and how I can do it. I'd prefer not to get spoon fed code, I just need someone to explain it all too me.
EDIT: After some further researching, I have found a perfect example to make my question clearer. Notice this url:
has the same url as:
But shows different content, it's a completely new page, that is being 'dynamically' created.
Then more random URLs from the same site:
Thanks, Sutton
If someone could explain to what this system is called
It's called RewriteEngine and it's part of apache mod_rewrite, other web-servers have different mods, but this the most popular.
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^shop/$ shop.php [L]
RewriteRule ^shop/products/(.*?)/$ products.php?type=$1 [L]
The 1st example will display the content of shop.php when a user accesses www.site.com/shop/
The 2nd example will send games, as argument ($1), to products.php?type=$1, if a user access www.site.com/shop/products/games/
[L] - is called a flag (L|last):
The
[L]flag causes mod_rewrite to stop processing the rule set. In most contexts, this means that if the rule matches, no further rules will be processed. This corresponds to the last command in Perl, or the break command in C. Use this flag to indicate that the current rule should be applied immediately without considering further rules.
^ is relative to web root (somesite.com/^)$ represents the end of the string (somesite.com/^somedir/test/$ this part will not be processed)
Resources:
Learn more about mod_rewrite and rewrite Flags
So certainly if you were to use a framework like Laravel, its a very easy way of having routing.
There is a "routes.php" file in every project that defines calls to a URL and responds with a controllers method. This will generally return a view. It makes it as easy to create something like this as adding a line like this
Route::get('home', 'PagesController@home');
to your routes file and when you go to example.com/home it will fire the controller called 'PagesController' and run its home method. Within this method you could return a view that will be the page that you want to display.
This can be expanded in other ways. You could have another route that is nearly the same but have another method for when someone sends post data to the same controller.
Route::post('home', 'PagesController@submittedhome');
So now you have another route that will take a post input to that page and fire a completely different method from the same controller. These kind of controls + many many more can allow you to achieve what you want really easily and is part of the core fundamentals of laravel.
Here is the Routing page on the laravel page that can illuminate you a little more.
There are many frameworks that use the term url rewriting but obviously not referring to .htaccess. Frequently it's called routing. WordPress does this by using page slugs.
In WordPress, .htacces sends requests for existing files and directories directly through, bypassing WP. Anything not matching as described above must be a "virtual" page. and is sent to index.php
The URI is then parsed in one way or another usually involving regular expressions. Each part of the URI path correlates to a "slug", these are then used to create a database query to generate the relevant content.
There's a lot more going on in terms of selecting specific templates for certain slug types.
A low tech approach to achieve the same outcome without requiring routing is to create a folder with the desired name, and have an index.php (or index.html) within it. Then when the url is called - the default is to open the index file within the folder, even if it is not specified in the URL.
therefore
http://example.com/shop.php/product-category.php/games/
would be the equivalent of calling
http://example.com/shop.php/product-category.php/games/index.php
Note that I am NOT advocating this (I think it would get messy very quickly and there are way more efficient solutions), nor am I suggesting that the given examples are doing it this way, but I wanted to post this because it is a viable method to producing url's without file names or indexes listed. Just not a very good one IMO.