Creating user friendly URLs with .htaccess file

Question

I have two php files in the same directory posts.php and postdetails.php. The posts.php page lists all posts and postdetails.php displays the post when the postid is set like: postdetails.php?id=3

I want to make the posts and postdetails pages accessible without the .php and also add a trailing forward slash like:

instead of www.domain.com/posts.php

I'd have:

www.domain.com/posts/

I used this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/$ $1.php
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ /$1/$2.php
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(\.[a-zA-Z0-9]{1,5}|/)$
RewriteRule (.*)$ /$1/ [R=301,L]

and now I can access posts.php the way I want, as in: www.domain.com/posts/

but now all the posts show links as www.domain.com/posts/postdetails.php?id=NUMBER

The thing is I'd like them to also like they are in the posts subdirectory but I can't seem to make it work.

I also want to change the id to slug

So that I'd have something like postdetails.php?slug=this-is-a-post and have it proprerly rerouted to www.domain.com/posts/this-is-a-post/

and I'm using this function to create my slugs.

function createSlug($str)
{
    if($str !== mb_convert_encoding( mb_convert_encoding($str, 'UTF-32', 'UTF-8'), 'UTF-8', 'UTF-32') )
        $str = mb_convert_encoding($str, 'UTF-8', mb_detect_encoding($str));
    $str = htmlentities($str, ENT_NOQUOTES, 'UTF-8');
    $str = preg_replace('`&([a-z]{1,2})(acute|uml|circ|grave|ring|cedil|slash|tilde|caron|lig);`i', '\\1', $str);
    $str = html_entity_decode($str, ENT_NOQUOTES, 'UTF-8');
    $str = preg_replace(array('`[^a-z0-9]`i','`[-]+`'), '-', $str);
    $str = strtolower( trim($str, '-') );
    return $str;
}

Any help please?

Answer 1

Create a directory posts with an index-file (present a list of posts, link to the pretty url) and this .htaccess:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/posts/[^/]+/.*$
RewriteRule ^/posts/([^/]+)/$ postdetails.php?slug=$1 [QSA,L]

The pretty url

in this pattern:
http://www.example.com/posts/slug/

e.g.:
http://www.example.com/posts/keywords-are-here/

In the file postdetails.php you can evaluate the param $_GET['slug'].

Answer 2

guessing from your problem, you could save your slug in your database upon creation, and use that one to identify the post also (most likely always will be unique, and if not use something as a date to go with it or just add the id to the end of it?). in your posts.php file then you begin with

if(isset($_GET['id'])) { //your post identifier, if this is set, show a post

  include("postdetails.php");

} else {

  //your posts code

}

on your index you then include the page if it is being called:

if(isset($_GET['p'])) {
  include($_GET['p'] . '.php'); //include the page you want, it is a seperate php page
}

and for your htaccess, you use something like this (code based upon something i use myself), where $p is the page you are on (to make it more website friendly, in your case this would be posts, or any other page) and the id is the next variable. if you use this however, all pages you create must use these two variables, so you need to rename any other scripts to use these variables. more can be added in similar fashion of course.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^([^/\.]+)/([^/\.]+)/([^/\.]+)/?$ index.php?p=$1&id=$2&actie=$3
RewriteRule ^([^/\.]+)/([^/\.]+)/?$ index.php?p=$1&id=$2
RewriteRule ^([^/\.]+)/?$ index.php?p=$1

this may be not the most elegant way to do it though, more experienced users should answer also.