Implementing "friendly" URLs using .htaccess

Question

I tried some of the other answers I could find in here, but it didn't work out. It's really simple though.

I want

/page?id=PAGENAME

to be accessible AND redirected to

/PAGENAME

Can you help me?

EDIT:

It feels like my already messed-up .htaccess file needs to be included in here. I already have basic rewriting enabled, but this feature is needed for two other "special pages". In the requested solution above, I would therefore just replace "page" with the two pagenames (it's danish names, so I thought it was easier this way).

Currently I have this. If you have any improvements to it, it's appreciated - but I just want this to work with the requested solution aswell.

# Options -Multiviews -Indexes +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

# Always on https
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [R,L]

# remove trailing slash
#RewriteRule ^(.*)\/(\?.*)?$ $1$2 [R=301,L]

#301 Redirect everything .php  to  non php
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /([^.]+\.)+php?\ HTTP
RewriteRule (.+)\.php?$ http://MYURL.dk/$1 [R=301,L] 

#Hide the .php   from url
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}\.php -f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.php 

#301 Redirect everything mistype after file extension -

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

#301 Redirect everything to current url - 
RedirectMatch permanent /(.*).php/.* http://MYURL.dk/$1.php

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -D  
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.*)/$  
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1/ [L]  

#301 Redirect from non www to www
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.MYURL.dk [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://MYURL.dk/$1 [R=301,L]

#301 redirect index.php to /
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} index.php
RewriteRule .* http://MYURL.dk/ [R=301,L]

#Deny access to songs
RewriteCond $1 !(loadmedia)\.php
RewriteRule ^songs/(.*)$ - [L,F]

Answer 1

It looks like you are wanting to implement "friendly" (or "pretty") URLs, making the URLs more friendly for you users (search engines don't really mind what your URLs look like).

The first step is to change all your on-page links to use the new "friendly" URL. So, you links should all be of the form /pagename (not /page?id=PAGENAME).

Then, in .htaccess, you need to internally rewrite this "friendly" URL into the real URL that your server understands. This can be done using mod_rewrite. In the .htaccess file in your document root:

# Enable the rewrite engine
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On

# Rewrite the "friendly" URL back to the real URL
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !^id=
RewriteRule ^([\w-]*) /page?id=$1 [L]

If the file does not exist (!-f) and does not contain the id URL param then internally rewrite the request from /<pagename> to /page?id=<pagename>. This assumes your <pagename> consists only of the characters a-z, A-Z, 0-9, _ and -.

If this is a new site and the old URLs are not already indexed or referenced by external sites then you can stop here.

However, if you are changing an existing URL structure then you also need to externally redirect the real (ugly) URL to the "friendly" URL before the above internal rewrite. (This is actually what you are asking in your question.) In order to prevent a rewrite loop we can check against %{THE_REQUEST} (which does not change when the URL is rewritten).

# Redirect real URLs to "friendly" URLs
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} \?id=([\w-]*)
RewriteRule ^page$ /%1? [R=302,L]

Change the 302 (temporary) to 301 (permanent) when you are sure this is working OK. Permanent redirects are cached by the browser so can make testing a problem.

So, in summary, with the above two parts shown together:

# Enable the rewrite engine
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On

# Redirect real URLs to "friendly" URLs
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} \?id=([\w-]*)
RewriteRule ^page$ /%1? [R=302,L]

# Rewrite the "friendly" URL back to the real URL
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !^id=
RewriteRule ([\w-]*) /page?id=$1 [L]

The order of directives is important. External redirects should nearly always come before internal rewrites.

---

UPDATE#1:

I want /concept?id=NAME to go to /NAME and /studio?id=NAME to go to /NAME - there's 5-10 different "pages" from both concept and studio. [Corrected according to later comment]

Since id=NAME maps to /NAME you can achieve all 10-20 redirects with just a single rule:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^id=(NAME|foo|bar|baz|abc|def|ghi)
RewriteRule ^(concept|studio)$ /%1? [R,L]

This will redirect a URL such as /studio?id=foo to /foo.

As with all external redirects this should be one of the first rules in your .htaccess file.

Change R to R=301 when you have tested that it is working OK.

To make this more "dynamic", ie. match any "NAME" then change the CondPattern, for example:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^id=([\w-]*)

UPDATE#2:

If the path part of the URL (ie. concept or studio) is required then you can modify the RewriteRule substitution like so:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^id=([\w-]*)
RewriteRule ^(concept|studio)$ /$1/%1? [R,L]

Which will redirect /concept?id=foo to /concept/foo.

Or, to be completely "dynamic" (bearing in mind this will now capture anything):

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^id=([\w-]*)
RewriteRule ^([\w-]+)$ /$1/%1? [R,L]

Answer 2

Generally the URL in address bar should be like

www.siteurl.com/pagename/ for seo purpose and then read this url from .htaccess using rule which gives this query string parameter values in your php file.

.htaccess rule can be like

RewriteRule ^(.*)/$ /page?id=$1 [QSA,L]