.Htaccess

[Jonathon]

Hello,

 

i've been making this project in my spare time, haven't looked at it for a while. But i have some spare time so i'm going to dip my toe again.

 

I have been using the following .htaccess rules

 

RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-d  
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-f   
RewriteRule ^about/?$ about.php 
RewriteRule ^about/([A-Za-z\+\-]+)/?$ ./about.php?get=$1  

 

Which achieves what I wanted (initially). In that I wanted to be able to make these URLs:

www.example.com/about.php
www.example.com/about.php?get=jonathon

 

 

Become these URLs respectively:

www.example.com/about
www.example.com/about/jonathon

 

Which once i'd fiddled around and achieved it, I was pretty happy with. Obviosuly this meant some changes to my relative CSS paths, which was a bit fiddly, but I couldn't see a better way around it. Though if you know any good ideas, please let me know.

 

My scenario now is much as I enjoy that these URLs look prettier, there are 2 problems with them.

 

1 - if someone types

www.example.com/about/

for example, the css relative paths fail. So the paages aren't styled.

 

2 - Also in terms of seo it looks like duplicate content

 

Sooo, my next thought was to automatically append the trailing slash, so that ^about becomes ^about/ and ^about/jonathon becomes ^about/jonathon/ auomatically. Therefore stopping a duplicate content problem and also meaning that my css will render properly.

 

So far reading around the many many articles and examples i've seen before i've come up with this:

RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.*)/$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://localhost/www.project_1.co.uk/$1/ [L,R=301] 

 

Which works in that 'about' does indeed become 'about/' and 'about/jonathon' does becomes 'about/jonathon/'

 

Regrettably, I always get a object not found 404 error!

 

Which is not the desired effect, I am not particulary good, (in fact i'm not even remotely good at .htaccess) so can anyone help me out with this conundrum. I have been clearing my browser cache regulary as I tinker with it to make sure that it always using the most up to date .htaccess file.

 

Thanks in advance

 

Jonathon

[Larry]

Hey Jonathon,

 

First, I would say that any time you're messing with rewrite rules, unless you're doing straight-up redirects, I'd recommend using an absolute path to the CSS files and the media. Just more reliable. As for the issues with .htaccess, yes, it's a pain. The complexity of a Web server, a browser's behavior, and regular expressions, all in one! Could you confirm the complete .htaccess rules you've got now, in order, and I'll take a look.

[Jonathon]

Hi Larry,

 

Thanks for getting back to me. I think i'm going to use an absolute path to reference my css/images folders as initially it is easier. Mainly because i'm going to be creating similar url structures to the ones wordpress use.

www.example.com/blog/this-is-a-blog/

The number of forward slashes may change and its just easier using absolute paths.

 

The .htaccess rule I have been using is

Options +FollowSymLinks  
RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-d  
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-f   
RewriteRule ^about/?$ about.php 
RewriteRule ^about/([A-Za-z\+\-]+)/?$ ./about.php?get=$1  

RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-d  
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-f   
RewriteRule ^contact/?$ contact.php 
RewriteRule ^contact/([A-Za-z\+\-]+)/?$ ./contact.php?get=$1  

RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-d  
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-f   
RewriteRule ^blog/?$ blog.php 
RewriteRule ^blog/([A-Za-z\+\-]+)/?$ ./blog.php?get=$1  

 

And so on for my other pages. I know that this method probably isnt the most efficent when referencing each page individually, but I was just pleased that it worked initially.

 

I then commented out all my rules and basically used this set of rules on its own:

RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.*)/$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://localhost/www.project_1.co.uk/$1/ [L,R=301] 

 

This does work in that I get a trailing slash automatically if ones isn't given and it isn't duplicated if its already specifying the trailing slash. It also handles pages '/' wise correctly if there dynamic too like about/jonathon becomes about/jonathon/ which is the desired look. (Except the page fails )

 

I guess that I am not passing the get information behind the scenes and hence the 404 error. I have tried to combine these rules in order to get it to work as between these 2 rules they cover my objective. I just can't get them to work together and achieve the overall goal of automatically appending a trailing slash to ^about or ^sbout/jonathon and the imformation behind the scenes all being correct. And the page displaying

[Larry]

Okay, I'll take a look at this and see what I can figure out.

[Jonathon]

Thanks Larry,

 

I'd really appreciate that

[Larry]

Okay, here's what seemed to work for me. You'll need to tweak it accordingly:

 

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /

# Add slashes to the end of everything, if not present:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !\.[^./]+$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.*)/$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://localhost/$1/ [R=301,L]

# Redirect about/ and about/X to about.php?get=X:
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-d  
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-f   
RewriteRule ^about/$ about.php 
RewriteRule ^about/([A-Za-z\+\-]+)/?$ about.php?get=$1  
</IfModule>

 

 

Let me know if I missed something or if it's not working. Also, to apply this to multiple scripts, you could do:

 

RewriteRule ^(about)|(contact)|(blog)/$ $1.php 

RewriteRule ^(about)|(contact)|(blog)/([A-Za-z\+\-]+)/?$ $1.php?get=$2

 

That's untested but should work.

[Jonathon]

Thank you very very much Larry

 

I've learnt a lot from this .htaccess job, I'm going to try and fiddle with other kind of ideas too. I think i'll probably end up getting Apress mod_rewrite book too.

 

What are your thoughts about trailing slashes seo performace, somebody in "the game" said that generally they and others (not all i don't think) thought that without slashes was better as engines expect a true url not to have any trailing slash. I'd never thought of that before, but I see the logic. But with things like WordPress they all seem to replicate adding the trailing slash.

 

Thanks again Larry !!

[Floydian]

FWIW: SEO is 99% about content and 1% everything else. Therefore, the URL setup is really not important. The question you need to ask yourself is can a text only/non javascript browser navigate to all the links in your website. If the answer is yes, then you have succeeded in SEO optimizing your URL's.

 

Cheers!

[Jonathon]

Yes I hear what your saying. Luckily they always do

[Larry]

Floydian is definitely correct. I prefer things to be consistent, so would rather there always be a terminating slash. This would also make hits reporting more reliable.

[Jonathon]

Floydian is definitely correct. I prefer things to be consistent, so would rather there always be a terminating slash. This would also make hits reporting more reliable.

 

Yeah I agree, i really like the look of URLs with the trailing slash, which is why I embarked on this .htaccess mission. I think I struggled getting the rule right on my local host because I was working between different folders in my localhost. So i'm going to try to fix my .htaccess files so that the rules work within folders 1 level down from my localhost.

 

Appreciate your help Larry and Floydian's input too