Display content based on URL - apache

Question

In my site I had a desire to make simpler URLs such as:
http://www.example.com/about
Instead of:
http://www.example.com/about.php
Mostly for aesthetics, for now I have Apache redirect to ./default.php if a directory is requested. However this forces me to create a directory at
http://www.example.com/about/ and a file inside it called default.php ending up with:
http://www.example.com/about/default.php
I know there's a better way, probably using PHP or JS, what do?

Answer 1

it's all in apache's configs,
rewriteEngine can do that for you
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_rewrite.html
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/misc/rewriteguide.html
http://alexcican.com/post/how-to-remove-php-html-htm-extensions-with-htaccess/
A snippet taken from third link:
To remove the .php extension from a PHP file for example yoursite.com/wallpaper.php to yoursite.com/wallpaper you have to add the following code to your Apache config:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^([^\.]+)$ $1.php [NC,L]
If you want to remove the .html extension:
RewriteRule ^([^\.]+)$ $1.html [NC,L]
That’s it! You can even link pages inside the HTML document without needing to add the extension of the page. For example:
wallpaper