John Jones

Hello Lou. The "Improved SEO with mod_rewrite" section of Chapter 2 does an excellent job of teaching how to change a site's URL from a root URL with a bootstrap $_GET suffiix, which you described, to root URL with an easily interpreted apparent directory structure. If you already have a bootstrap modular site like the one Larry teaches in the first part of chapter 2 ("Modularizing a Web Site"), the conversion using mod_rewrite will be simple. If you are implementing both of the first two sections of Chapter 2 for the first time, note that the last essential step of using mod_rewrite is so simple that Larry mentions it as a tip rather than an enumerated step: "Once you adopt this system, you'd want to change the URLs for the links (in the HTML), and the action attribute of the search form." In fact, you will not have adopted this system until you complete this tip. To complete the tip, in all action='x' or href='x' code where x references a part of your site that is enumerated as a case of the main switch, just replace x with the name y from case 'y'. Simple. Elegant. Brief. Two other points worth noting: 1. You probably will not want to list all your site's pages in index.php's master switch. Pages that should not be accessible except until login validation or further processing are probably generally left with a bootstrap $_GET suffix. 2. Larry demonstrates fairly minimal expressions in the index.php cases. You can expand this to specify page-specific header elements or other things.