Dynamic .htaccess file in PHP

Question

As part of a project, we're currently looking at adding in SEO URLs to pages. This is for an online store, and there are numerous types of content within the site: static pages (for example "About Us", "Privacy Policy", product categories and product pages.

We have the numerous URL stubs stored in a MySQL table as follows:

+-----------------+------------------+----------------+
|    url_stub     | destination type | destination_id |
+-----------------+------------------+----------------+
| privacy-policy/ |       page       |       1        |
+-----------------+------------------+----------------+
|   category-1/   |     category     |       2        |
+-----------------+------------------+----------------+
|  my-product-1/  |      product     |       1        |
+-----------------+------------------+----------------+

One option to serve these up would be to have a huge index.php file which is capable of handling everything, however, we would much prefer to have separate pages to serve up the different content types. For example anything with a destination_type of page would go to page.php?id=#, and so forth. So, for the examples in the table above, these would be directed as follows:

privacy-policy/ = page.php?id=1
category-1/     = category.php?cat=2
my-product-1/   = product.php?prod=1

My question is this: what would be the best practice to achieve this? We don't want to include the destination_id anywhere in the SEO-friendly URL. I was thinking that it might be possible to create a dynamic .htaccess file which outputs everything on the fly with mod_rewrite, but I can't find any solutions.

Any help or comments would be most gratefully received.

Community · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-23 09:59:01Z

1

Short answer would be "no you have to rewrite it every time" but this older question should answer yours :) Can I make a dynamic .htaccess file?

Otherwise, complicated/stupid/useless idea:

RewriteRule /(.*)  /index.php?url=$1

Then in your PHP file

if (isset($_GET['url']))
{
  //Parse url and echo page according to requested url
}

edited May 23, 2017 at 9:59

CommunityBot

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answered Aug 18, 2011 at 11:35

red

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2 Comments

BenM Over a year ago

Thanks Josh. So, are there any solutions at all?

red Over a year ago

Edited to give you the most dynamic rewrite you can have if you want to use a database for your rewrites.

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