.htaccess ModREwrite

Question

This is a totally new area for me so please be patient. I want to create "permalinks" for a dynamic site I am working on. At the moment all the pages (not the index) are referenced using an ID variable thus:

http://www.domainname.com/page.php?ID=122 (etc)

I want to create a suitable rewrite rule so that a useable URL would be more like this:

http://www.domainname.com/page/'pagetitle'.html (could be .php doen't matter)

Page title is stored in the database and obviously is linked directly to the ID

Am I right in thinking thr rewrite rule would be something like this?

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^(([^&]*&)*)ID=([^&]+)(&+(.*))?$

RewriteRule ^page\.php$ /page/%3?%1%5 [L,R=301]

My ideal would be to just create

http://www.domainname.com/'pagetitle'.html

But have absolutly no idea how to do that.

Now the other question/sub question.

If the rewrite works i.e. you type in http://www.domainname.com/page/'pagetitle'.html to a browser address bar does the htaccess file work "the other way" in accessing the page http://www.domainname.com/page.php?ID=122 or do I have to create a function to take the 'pagetitle'.html bit of the URL and convert it to page.php?ID=122 ?

Also, sorry, but this is all new; if I create a site map (xml or php etc) using http://www.domainname.com/page/'pagetitle'.html will the SE spiders go to http://www.domainname.com/page.php?ID=122? or di I need to create the sitemap using the ID variables?

Answer 1

Question 1 and 2: The condition is not required in this case. Use it like this:

RewriteRule ^/page/([\w-]+).html$ /page.php?title=$1 [L,R=301]

This transforms /page/blabla.html to /page.php?title=blabla You need to find the right page using the title parameter in page.php

Question 3: I suggest you never use the querystring variant of the urls in any of your anchor links or xml sitemap. This way the spiders will only know of the friendly urls.