Friendly URL without mod_rewrite

After while away from thyphp, I am back and continuing with the a saga of SEO (Search engine optimization) focusing on Friendly URL.

In this post I will continue Friendly URL! is it really needed? but focusing on performance with Apache.

The most common way to have friendly URL is with the mod_rewrite, which is an Apache web-server module. This Apache module accept regular expressions and transform to a local file (normally a php-script ).

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^page/([^/\.]+)/?$ index.php?page=$1 [L]

That configuration could be in the Apache’s configuration file (httpd.conf) or int the “.htaccess” file (or “distributed configuration files”). The htaccess provides a way to make configuration changes on a per-directory basis. A file, containing one or more configuration directives, is placed in a particular document directory, and the directives apply to that directory, and all subdirectories thereof.

.htaccess files should be used in a case where the content providers need to make configuration changes to the server on a per-directory basis, but do not have root access on the server system. The main reason is because the htaccess is interpreted for every request and the main configuration (httpd.conf) is compiled when the server startup.

The better solution for have friendly URL is to have all the mod_rewrite regular expression on the httpd.conf, that have a benefit of performance, but for every change we must restart the apache webserver.

Another valid solution is the class URL Rewriter Class which redirect all not found pages to a PHP script, and that script has regular expression for match a given page. This solution work with mod_rewrite.

But what happened if we don’t have mod_rewrite on our server, we don’t like regular expression, or we’d like to avoid it for a performance issue. There exist a way that I saw on the PHP Classes site in this post where Manuel Lemos (PHP Classes site admin) response my answer about the site URL handling.

If we have a page http://foobar.com/blog.php the test.php with Apache ( I don’t know about other webservers) we can extend the URI as, http://foobar.com/blog.php/this-is-a-friendly-url.html. In blog.php script we need to work with $_SERVER[’REQUEST_URI’] ( in this example its value /blog.php/this-is-a-friendly-url.html).

Obviously have a blog.php in as a “directory name” is not so beauty, anyone know that blog.php is an php-script. To solve this “look” problem, apache come with a feature called “MultiViews”. You can add this feature on the httpd.conf or in the worst in “.htaccess” file.

Options Multiviews

With this feature will be able to have friendly URL such as http://foobar.com/blog/this-is-a-friendly-url.html with less effort, we manage everything with a greater performance.

Also to help with parsing URL, I recommend to extract what you need from this class.

I hope you like this post!

See you soon on others post!

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