Routing URLs in PHP

Question

I'm working on a web page project. I decided to use Apache, PHP (5.1.7, version imposed by my service provider) and Dwoo (templating) for this purpose.

I want to route URLs to my templates. I'm aware there are many frameworks doing this kind of thing. I'm just wondering if there's a nice way to achieve it without.

I've set up my project as follows:

• src/dwoo - Dwoo files
• index.php - This should handle routing. Currently it just renders the front page of the site using a template.
• templates - Templates that represent actual pages.

There is minimal amount of business logic (no real model). It's all just pretty static pages. Using templates makes maintenance work easier (inheritance ie.).

Any idea how to set up routing in this case? I guess ideally each given URL should route via index.php that then somehow decides which template to render (ie. /category/pagename would map to templates/category/pagename.tpl).

Answer 1

Use mod_rewrite to route everything to a single index.php file. Then check the variable in $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] within this file to dispatch to the required handler.

This configuration will enable mod_rewrite, if it's installed:

DirectorySlash Off
Options FollowSymLinks Indexes
DirectoryIndex index.php

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}  -d
RewriteRule  ^.*$  -  [L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}  -f
RewriteRule  ^.*$  -  [L]

RewriteRule ^.*$    index.php [L]

Answer 2

Like trolskn (+1) describes:

Use mod_rewrite to route everything to a single index.php file. Then check the variable in $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] within this file to dispatch to the required handler.

But I found the following .htaccess (placed in the folder with the index.php which should "consume" everything after it) much more helpful:

Options -MultiViews
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^ index.php [QSA,L]

Also I would like to note that you might encounter the message

.htaccess: Invalid command 'RewriteEngine', perhaps misspelled
or defined by a module not included in the server configuration

This can easily be solved with sudo a2enmod rewrite && sudo service apache2 restart (source)

Answer 3

You might want to use PEAR's Net_URL_Mapper.