convert dynamic to seo friendly url - apache

Question

I know there is plenty on this issue in SO and elsewhere, and I read it all by now, but I do not seem to get this to work despite sweating it out all day.
So, see if you guys can point me in the right direction.
I have a dynamically created url ( by customer selecting a form at index.php ) that looks like, as an instance:
http://www.example.com/marques.php?brand_id=39-Ford
I need it to show to the user and search engines as:
www.example.com/marques/Ford
I have set up .htaccess as follows:
...other .htaccess stuff..
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^\/marques #here, I believe, to apply this only when URI is /marques
RewriteRule /([A-Z][a-z]+$)/ marques/$1 [L] #here I meant to get 'Ford' in this instance.
I plan to have the destination file, marques.php handle the request with the given brand info.
This is not working at all. I continue to see the 'old' URL.
Of course, the next step would be to have the .htaccess redirect when the customer clicks on the 'friendly' link at the search engine ( hopefully soon ). But I need the first step to be resolved.
By the way, I checked with my provider and they confirm that mod_rewrite is enabled.
Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

You can use this your root .htaccess:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} \s/+marques\.php\?brand_id=([^\s&]+) [NC]
RewriteRule ^ /marques/%1? [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^marques/([^/.]+)/?$ marques.php?brand_id=$1 [L,QSA,NC]

Answer 2

After further investigation I realized I fell for this widespread misconception that one can use mod_rewrite to create SEO friendly URL's. Unfortunately, this misconception is reinforced throughout SO as well.
After reading this article from Matthew James Taylor and this it became clear that one has to create the SEO friendly URL elsewhere, not through mod_rewrite, as was my thinking.
Mod_rewrite is ONLY part of the process.
If one has only links with anchor tags, one has to go in each page of the website and hardcode the change to the SEO friendly URL. In my case, the URL's are created dynamically.
May be there are alternative solutions, but this did the trick.
So, first I changed my form, from this:
<form action="marques.php " method="post" class="form1" >
<select class="select_home" name="brand_id" onchange="form.submit()" >
<option value= "<?php echo $row['brand_id']; ?>">"<?php echo $row['brand']; ?>"</option>
To this new set up:
<form action=" " method="post" class="form1" >
<select class="select_home" name="brand" onchange="form.submit()" >
<option value= "<?php echo $row['brand']; ?>">"<?php echo $row['brand']; ?>"</option>
What I am doing above is submitting the form to the page itself by placing action = " " and changing name and value to 'brand' ie, the name of the brand as opposed to the brand_id. This last one is meant to have the URL 'really' friendly. One can decide to have both the name and the id in the URL.
The SEO friendly URL is 'created' in the sequence. This script is placed at the very top of the same page, before anything else, otherwise 'header' will not work.
if(isset($_POST['brand'])){
$brand = $_POST['brand'];
$brand = str_replace(" ", "-", $brand);
$url = '/marques-voiture/' . $brand;
header("Location:" .$url );
exit();
}
So, in the above the SEO friendly URL is created and will show at the browser:
www.example.com/marques/Ford or www.example.com/Land-Rover
Next, now yes, with mod_rewrite tell the browser how to make sense of that URL and fetch the right script which is:
www.example.com/marques.php?brand=Ford
I made that as follows within .htaccess:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/?marques-voiture [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ([\-A-Za-z]+$) /marques.php?brand=$1 [L]
Of course it is necessary to change the destination script to receive a GET, instead of a POST which now contains the brand and not the brand_id as before.
Hope that helps.