How to set-up friendly URLs

Question

I am looking for your recommandations on what would be the best way to implement friendly URLs.

What I currently do is redirect all 404 requests to folders or files that do not exist to index.php. index.php reads the query string and makes a database call to see if the url is in the page_urls table then based on the page type fetches content etc etc.

The .htaccess contains the following lines:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule .* index.php [L]

Is there a more "clever" way of doing this please? Thank you.

Thank you.

That's too broad a question. You really should describe more of what you mean by "clever". — casablanca
– casablanca, Commented Nov 23, 2010 at 22:39
One thought on this that isn't about the mechanics of the URL rewriting: Think about what HTTP status codes you're sending back. If you find a page in the DB that you think is what was desired, a permanent redirect (301) to that page's canonical URL is probably best. Or, if you want to send the message that the resources at the failing URLs are truly gone, return a 404 (optionally including page content that think might be helpful to a lost human). If you're returning a normal (200, "OK") response, you're sort of saying that it's OK to keep using those (broken) URLs. — Paul Bissex
– Paul Bissex, Commented Nov 24, 2010 at 1:59
Hey. casablanca: "clever" is anything that can be done better. The above variant works, so I am looking for something better if exists. pbx: I am using header() to set a 200 OK or 404 not found for good URLs or bad URLs respectively. — Francisc
– Francisc, Commented Nov 26, 2010 at 20:17

Brian H · Accepted Answer · 2010-11-23 22:58:07Z

1

The best way I've found is to do something like the following:

RewriteEngine on RewriteRule ([a-zA-Z0-9_-]*)\.html index.php?page=$1 [L]

answered Nov 23, 2010 at 22:58

Brian H

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Francisc Over a year ago

It's an idea, thanks. But it's basically the same system only with a different way of redirecting.

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