Prettifying URLs for a PHP-based club website

Question

I have a website for my car enthusiast club ("example.org") whose content can be divided into three main sections: Startseite (the "front page" of the site), Mitglieder (membership directory), and Vereinsinfos ("about us"). For each section, the content is handled by a corresponding PHP script: /home.php, /mitglieder.php, and /verein.php.

I'd like to prettify the URLs to eliminate the .php extensions, so that the URLs look like

• http://example.org/home (maps to /home.php)
• http://example.org/home/ (also maps to /home.php)
• http://example.org/home/1 (maps to /home.php with a data=1 query string)

After reading all documentation, I formed my .htaccess like this (repeated for the mitglieder and verein sections):

RewriteRule ^home\/$ /home.php [L]
RewriteRule ^home$ /home/ [L]
RewriteRule ^home\/([^/]*)$ /home.php?data=$1 [L]

This works, but I can't figure out how to improve it further after reading all the documentation on the Internet. (I have difficulty understanding regular expressions.)

In addition to the content above, I also have static resources under /images/, /js/, /css/, etc. which should be left alone.

Answer 1

First, I'd like to point out that when you map URLs with varying numbers of slashes to the same content, you must take care when referencing images or links in your HTML. Basically, you must use absolute URLs everywhere instead of relative URLs.

If you want to have both /home and /home/ refer to the exact same content, it would be good practice to pick one of them as the canonical URL. You should either enforce your choice by redirecting the alternate URL to the canonical URL, or just inform web crawlers of your preference putting a <link rel="canonical" href="…"> tag in the page.

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If you don't want the canonicalizing redirect, then first two rules would be better combined as RewriteRule ^home/?$ /home.php [L]. (The question mark in the regex means that the trailing slash is optional; both home and home/ will match.)

If you do want a canonicalizing redirect, then you'll need the first two rules to remain separate:

RewriteRule ^home/$     /home.php    [L]
RewriteRule ^home$      /home/       [L,R]   # canonicalizing redirect

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The third rule can remain as it is. However, I recommend modifying your PHP script so that it accepts the additional path elements using $_SERVER['PATH_INFO'] instead of a $_GET['data'] parameter. Then you can combine your first and third rules:

RewriteRule ^home/(.*)$  /home.php/$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^home$       /home/       [L,R]   # canonicalizing redirect

Or, without the canonicalizing redirect, it's just one rule:

RewriteRule ^home(/.*)?$ /home.php$1  [L]

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You have three scripts. Instead of repeating all of the rules for each script, you should be able to combine them.

With canonicalizing redirects:

RewriteRule ^(home|mitglieder|verein)(/.*)?$ /$1.php$2   [L]
RewriteRule ^(home|mitglieder|verein)$       /$1/        [L,R]

With no canonicalizing redirects, it all collapses into one rule:

RewriteRule ^(home|mitglieder|verein)(/.*)?$ /$1.php$2

Answer 2

You can combine these:

RewriteRule ^home\/$ /home.php [L]
RewriteRule ^home$ /home/ [L]

Into:

RewriteRule ^home\/?$ /home.php [L]

In addition, you should also map /home.php to /home. So this will do all three:

RewriteRule ^home(?:\/|\.php)?$ /home.php [L]

Now your /home/1 rules. You've already got it, but you can make slight improvement:

RewriteRule ^home\/([^/]+)$ /home.php?data=$1 [L]

The + differentiates this rule from /home/.

If the data is alphanumerical you can improve this further:

RewriteRule ^home\/([\w-]+)$ /home.php?data=$1 [L]

You can replace home with other URLs as well.