I've been tasked with making an already existing e-commerce site SE friendly - which in this case means (amongst other things) letting the user change the URL for each page/product through the back end.
The site is an old asp site running on IIS6. I've started looking into http://www.codeplex.com/IIRF and http://www.helicontech.com/isapi_rewrite/ , but I'm a bit dubious about how to let the user change the URLS without them going into the server and hard coding them.
Ionic's Isapi Rewrite Filter runs from a .ini file, so I'm thinking that I will get the back end of the site to write to this ini file based on form inputs.
Does anyone have any experience or advice with regard to this?
edit:server is dedicated
By change URL fro each page, I think you mean change slug, or do you actually mean URL.
Slug: www.somesite.com/products/{slug}
URL: www.somesite.com/{url}
Here is how I would do it.
Give an original structure like this:
www.somesite.com/products.aspx?id=23
with an end goal of it to look like
www.somesite.com/products/the-product-to-be-sold
Or better yet
www.somesite.com/products/23/the-product-to-be-sold
I would create a rule that looks like this.
RewriteRule /products/([0-9]+)/(.*) /products.asp?id=$1&slug=$2 [NC]
That way you don't have to change anything, the name is in the URL for SEO optimization, and the ID is still there too.
Related
Say I was making a URL shortener service, and I want it to be able to make urls like [domain]/xf6B2sT. But I also want to be able to have "normal looking urls," whether the pages are static or dynamic, and if a normal page is routed, it won't continue to look for ones of this compact format.
It would be best if you had an algorithmic way to tell whether a URL was a shortened URL or not without looking it up in your database and without comparing to all the regular site URLs. That algorithm just has to be something that allows you to examine a URL and immediately determine whether it's a shortened URL or not. If not, you send it to a router for your site URLs and if it doesn't match there you return a 404. If it does match the format for a shortened URL, then you look it up in the database and go from there.
The algorithm could be whatever you want. It could be that all site URLs have one level of path: http://yourdomain.com/site/home or it could be that all shortened URLs start with some magic character like an x that no site URLs will ever start with. There's an infinite number of possible algorithms you could invent. The point is you need to be able to quick look at a URL with some Javascript in your middleware and determine which it is without looking up anything in a database.
(Hi! This is my first time asking a question on Stack Overflow after years of finding answers here... Thanks!)
I have a dynamic page, and I'd like to have fixed URLs that point to different states of that page. So, for example: "www.mypage.co"(/index.php) is the base page, and it rearranges its content based on user choices. I'd then like to be able to point to "www.mypage.co/contentA" or "www.mypage.co/contentB" in order to automatically load base the page at "www.mypage.co" with the desired content.
At heart the problem is an aesthetic one. I know I could simply write www.mypage.co/index.html?state=contentA to reach the desired end, but I want to keep the URL simple and readable (ie, clean). I also, due to limitations in my hosting relationship, would most appreciate a solution that is server-independent (across LAM[PHP] stacks, at least), if possible.
Also, if I just have incorrect assumptions about how to implement clean URLs, I'd appreciate direction to a good, comprehensive explanation. I can't seem to find one...
You could use a htaccess file to redirect all requests to one location and then from there determine what you want to return to the client. Look over the htaccess/dispatch system that Tonic uses.
If you use Apache, you can use mod_rewrite. I have a rule like this where multiple restful urls all go to the same page, using regex and moving parts of the old url into parameters for the new url:
RewriteRule ^/testapp/(name|number|rn|sid|unii|inchikey|formula)(/(startswith))?/?(.*) /testapp/ProxyServlet?objectHandle=Search&actionHandle=drillIn&searchtype=$1&searchterm=$4&startswith=$3 [NC,PT]
That particular regex accepts urls like
testapp/name
testapp/name/zuchini
testapp/name/startswith/zuchini
and forwards them to the same page.
I also use UrlRewriteFilter for Tomcat, but as you mentioned PHP, that doesn't seem that it would be useful.
Total newbie at mod_rewrite.
Let's say I want to create nice URLs for every manufacturer on my site,
so I have
www.mysite.com/samsung
www.mysite.com/sony
www.mysite.com/acme
works well enough.
However, if I have hundreds of manufacturers and if they're changing constantly, what then? There are some vague references for something called rewrite map somewhere but nothing that explains it and no tutorials. Can anyone help?
Also, why is this problem not the main topic covered in tutorials for mod_rewrite? How is mod_rewrite possibly useful when you have to maintain it manually (assuming you have new content on your site once in a while)?
There is also mention of needing to have access to httpd.conf
How do I access httpd.conf on my hosting provider's server? How does every other site do this?
Thanks
Just came across this answer while searching for a similar solution — searching a bit further I discovered that mod_rewrite now has the RewriteMap directive, which will do exactly what you want without the need to run PHP or another scripting language.
It lets you define a mapping rule with a text file, a DBM file, an external script or an SQL query.
I hope that helps!
The way this would typically be done is that you would take all URLs that match a specific pattern and route them to a PHP file (or whatever your server-side programming language is) for more complex routing. Something like this:
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ myroute.php?url=$1 [QSA,L]
Then, in your myroute.php file, you can include logic to look at the "url" query string parameter, since it will contain the original URL that came in. Perhaps you could match it to a manufacturer in the database, or whatever else is required.
This example obviously takes all URLs and maps them to myroute.php. Another example might be something like:
RewriteRule ^/manufacturers/(.*)$ manuf.php?name=$1 [QSA,L]
In this case, it will map URLs like so:
/manufacturers/sony => /manuf.php?name=sony
/manufacturers/samsung => /manuf.php?name=samsung
etc...
In this case, your manuf.php file could look up the database based on the name query string parameter.
Problem:
I'd like to accept the original request. Say its, /IWantToGoHere/index.php
but I want to return to the browser, /GoHere/index.php
To be clear:
I actually want to send the original request location down to the script requested, however, I want to return the user a browser URL to another destination.
Code:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*)IWantToGoHere\/\.php$ GoHere/index.php [NC,C]
RewriteRule ^GoHere/index.php$ GoHere/index.php [R,NC]
Notes:
I realize the code above doesn't work. I've tried a number of different calls. I spent umpteen hours yesterday trying every clever solution I could pull out of my limited mod_rewrite knowledge bank. Based on my understanding of mod_rewrite, I don't think it's do able. I understand its not what the preprocessed was designed to do. At least not from anything I could find on the Apache web site. I've been told that if I could dream it up, that it could be done:) I was wondering if anyone had and ideas how to get it to work.
Why would you want to do that?:
Because I do. No really, I want the URL returned to the user for further processing.
weez
If I understand the question correctly, to accomplish this you'll need to send a header from /IWantToGoHere/index.php that redirects to /GoHere/index.php once the script is finished executing. That is, if you want Apache to still call IWantToGoHere but return to GoHere. So at the end of processing for IWantToGoHere script something like this:
header('Location: /GoHere/Index.php');
Which will redirect correctly.
With ASP.NET MVC (or using HttpHandlers) you can dynamically generate URLs, like the one in this question, which includes the title.
What happens if the title changes (for example, editing it) and there's a link pointing to the page from another site, or Google's Pagerank was calculated for that URL?
I guess it's all lost right? (The link points to nowhere and the pagerank calculated is lost)
If so, is there a way to avoid it?
I use the same system as is in place here, everything after the number in the URL is not used in the db query, then I 301 redirect anything else to be the title.
In other words, if the title changed, then it would redirect to the correct place. I do it in PHP rather than htaccess as it's easier to manage more complex ideas.
I think you're generally best off having the server send a permanent redirect to the new location, if possible.
That way any rank which is gained from third party links should, in theory, be transferred to the new location. I'm not convinced whether this happens in practice, but it should.
The way Stackoverflow seems to be implemented everything after the question number is superfluous as far as linking to the question goes. For instance:
SEO and hard links with dynamic URLs
links to this question, despite the fact that I just made up the 'question title' part out of thin air. So the link will not point to nowhere and the PageRank is not lost (though it may be split between the two URLs, depending on whether or not Google can canonicalize them into a single URL).
Have your app redirect the old URL via a 301 Redirect. This will tell Google to transfer the pagerank to the new URL.
If a document is moved to a different URL, the server should be configured to return a HTTP status code of 301 (Moved Permanently) for the old URL to tell the client where the document has been moved to. With Apache, this is done using mod_rewrite and RewriteRule.
The best thing to help Google in this instance is to return a permanent redirect on the old URL to the new one.
I'm not an ASP.NET hacker - so I can't recommend the best way to implement this - but Googling the topic looks fairly productive :-)
Yes, all SEO is lost upon a url change -- it forks to an entirely new record. The way to handle that is to leave a 301 redirect at the old title to the new one, and some search engines (read: Google) is smart enough to pick that up.
EDIT: Fixed to 301 redirect!