How does wordpress do it?

14 years ago

Hi Stephen,

The various permalink formats can be adjusted or customised in the Setting>Permalinks screen in your Admin area.

If it's the trailing / you're wanting to remove I believe there's a plugin that can do this. However, the trailing / appears on all WordPress permalink formats and doesn't have any negative effect on SEO (if that's what you're concerned about).

Cheers,

Martin.

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Stephen Dean 14 years ago

Thanks for your help Martin. Unfortunately my original post wasn't as clear as I meant it to be. I'm not trying to mess with Wordpress or permalinks, more I'm wondering how WP does it?

How does wordpress show a page at "blog.com/post" when there is no such directory as post?

I want to apply this to my own php script. It seems that data is being passed after the trailing / and I'd like to do the same thing with my script.

Anyone know how wordpress does it?

Thanks,
Stephen Dean
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chapdaddy

14 years ago

do some googling on 'php mod_rewrite'

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theIMgeek

14 years ago

Stephen, the dirty little secret is called "Rewrite Rules".

They are most commonly configured in a file named .htaccess (as in the case of WP) located in the root folder. Every URL request will first look for that file to see how it should proceed.

Basically, it can turn a "pretty" URL like domain.com/folder/section/page into an actual request for domain.com/index.php?folder=folder&section=section&page=page (or really just about anything you want it to do)

Now, setting up these rewrite rules can be a bit tricky, as you're dealing with "regular expressions" to essentially find and replace text. The formatting is a challenge, and even the slightest mistake will cause your whole site to be inaccessible until it gets fixed. So be careful if you're tinkering with a live site.

-Ryan

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Stephen Dean

14 years ago

Perfect guys, exactly what I needed. Will probably take me a bit but I'll figure it out.

Thanks!

Stephen

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NetMan

14 years ago

Originally Posted by Stephen Dean

Perfect guys, exactly what I needed. Will probably take me a bit but I'll figure it out.

Thanks!

Stephen

However, for that .htaccess rewrite rules option to work, web server (http server) MUST be Apache web server.

Best regards,

Andre Foisy

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Stephen Dean

14 years ago

Thanks guys.

I do need it to be my own script as it's not a CMS.

My server must be APACHE as I have gotten the mod-rewrite to work, just not quite perfectly yet.

And for Regular Expressions, I think what I'm doing is simple enough that it'll be easy.

I'm just trying to make this url

http://blog.com/example

equal to

http://blog.com/?e=example

In my tests last night it looked like I could just use

RewriteRule ^(.+)$ index.php?e=$1

That didn't quite work for me, as when I tried to GET the value of "e" all that outputted was "index.php" Not sure why...

Thanks again,
Stephen Dean

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NetMan

14 years ago

Originally Posted by Stephen Dean

http://blog.com/example

equal to

http://blog.com/?e=example

In my tests last night it looked like I could just use

RewriteRule ^(.+)$ index.php?e=$1

That didn't quite work for me, as when I tried to GET the value of "e" all that outputted was "index.php" Not sure why...

Thanks again,
Stephen Dean

Well that is very likely because the original link structure in your PHP program MUST be based on index.php?e=$1 URLs must result with string range... if not it will not work of course.

You should probably need to define
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase ()
RewriteCond ()

As well

Andre

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Stephen Dean 14 years ago
Thanks Ryan, tried it and it hasn't fixed it yet.

And I'm not sure what you mean Andre. But I've set up a test to make it as simple as possible to figure out. Here's what I'm doing.

I created a directory "a" so I'm working within blog.com/a/

Inside "a" I've just put two files. .htaccess and index.php

.htaccess contains only this right now:
Code:

RewriteEngine On RewriteRule ^(.+)$ index.php?e=$1 [NC,L]
and index.php simply uses GET to assign "e" to variable $e. And then it uses echo to print $e. I tried copying and pasting the code in to this post but it wouldn't accept it.

I assume when I get it to work that typing in this url

http://blog.com/a/success

will result in a page that simply outputs

"success"

Right now all that outputs is "index.php"

Cheers!
Stephen Dean
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SteveJohnson

14 years ago

WordPress does all of its redirecting internally. The .htaccess rewrite rules only look for existing files or directories then, if none are found, redirects to the WP index file.

If you can, take a look at the options table in a WordPress install, and look through the rewrite functions. WP maintains a 'rewrite_rules' option that contains the different rules. It's a pretty good example of how to use reg expressions in rewrites.

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sparckyz

14 years ago

With a few clicks wordpress is nice enough to do it all for you

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theIMgeek

14 years ago

I'm just running out the door, Stephen, but here's a quick thought.

Try this:

Code:

RewriteRule ^(.+)$ /index.php?e=$1 [NC,L]

-Ryan

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theIMgeek

14 years ago

Ah-HA! (head slapping moment)
The trouble is that the rewrite creates a bit of a loop, so it's sort of reading itself for the variable... hence "index.php".

Adding some lines to your htaccess will prevent the rewrite rule from happening when there is an actual physical file that matches the URL. (this is code used by Wordpress as well)

Code:

RewriteEngine On

# if the file exists, hop to it
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -s [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -l [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule ^.*$ - [NC,L]

# Send all "fake" URLs to the index.php for processing
RewriteRule ^(.+)$ index.php?e=$1 [NC,L]

-Ryan

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Stephen Dean

14 years ago

Genius Ryan, that would have taken me ages to troubleshoot and I probably would have given up. Thanks for your help, works perfect now. I owe you big.

Hope to see you at my blog and let me know if I can be of help with anything.

Cheers,
Stephen Dean

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