Couple of questions about .htaccess and friendly urls

Question

I've always been bad at apache and used very simple solutions. Right now I have built a cms software.. but the .htaccess is starting to be a huge downsize.

I will first explain, how my friendly-urls work and look like. My language-switch is url based and always contains two characters. And it looks like this: stackoverflow.com/en/ this makes the switching really easy and since its url based.. it works well in the SEO terms. Also, if no language-id is set, then the default language will be used (stackoverflow.com/).
There are no page-ids in numbers. I have unique page-ids in text: stackoverflow.com/services.html and for SEO and folder-directories-anti-conflict purposes .html at the end..
For subpages I have "$current_page" and "$parent_page" style variables: stackoverflow.com/services/translating.html Services being the parent and translating being the current page.
Some sample code too (I nerfed it alot, so you don't think its incomplete):

RewriteRule ^(et|en|fi)\/(.+)\/(.+)\.html  index.php?language=$1&pagelink=$3&parentlink=$2 [L,NC,QSA]

RewriteRule ^(.+)\/(.+)\.html  index.php?language=0&pagelink=$2&parentlink=$1 [L,NC,QSA]
RewriteRule ^(.+)\.html  index.php?language=0&pagelink=$1&parentlink=0 [L,NC,QSA]

How can I make the language-switch part more dynamic?
This method ..^(et|en|fi)\/.. means, that when I set up the cms, I must manually set the languages list. Best bet would be to set it somehow from the cms settings. Because, this way there are no conflicts related to folders. Is it possible global apace variable via php and then display it the .htaccess file? Something like this: ..^(LANGUAGELISTS)\/..? If this isn't possible, then next best thing would be to match 2 characters in that location and pass it as $_GET['language'].

How can I have unlimited parents dynamically?
Meaning, that the "$parent_page" is not set statically and I have unlimited children, similar to this: stackoverflow.com/services/translating/english/somesubpage.html. If that is possible, then also, how will it be used in the php, with an array?

Bounty edit
First part of the question is basically solved, unless somebody comes up with some php -> apache-array -> .htaccess way.
However, the second part of the question is still not solved. Since this is been the problem with all my projects and could possibly help somebody else in the future, I decided to add bounty to this question.

Answer 1

To answer your first question: You could use RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z]{2})([/]?)(.*)$ path/file.php?language=$1 This limits the first string to two characters and passes it on to $_GET['language']

Edit: adding RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f and RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d will prevent conflicts with existing directories / files

Second question is much more difficult..

Update:

What Shad and toopay say is a good start in my opinion. Using explode() to seperate levels and comparing it to the slug is quite simple. But it's getting complicated once you want to add flexibility to the script.

function get_URL_items() {
$get_URL_items_url = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
$get_URL_items_vars = explode("/",$get_URL_items_url);
for ($get_URL_items_i = 0; $get_URL_items_i < count($get_URL_items_vars) ; $get_URL_items_i++) {
    if(strlen(trim($get_URL_items_vars[$get_URL_items_i])) == 0) {
        unset($get_URL_items_vars[$get_URL_items_i]);
    }
}
return $get_URL_items_vars;

Let's say you you've got a website with a sub-section called "Festival" and a database filled with info for 100+ artist and you want your URLs to look like website.com/festival/<artistgenre>/<artistname>/. You don't want to create 100+ pages in your CMS so <artistgenre> and <artistname> are some kind of wildcards.

I found it hard to achieve this without a lot of if/else statements like:

$item = get_URL_items();    
if(is_user($item[2]) && is_genre($item[1]) && is_festival($item[0])) {
  // do mysql stuff here
}

Answer 2

Well, for SEO part, i think its better to have slug for each article (referencing you are use this for CMS). Means in your database, you have some "translation" table which translate the requesting uri/slug and associated it with $parent_page.

Answer 3

I somehow think this answer won't be very popular but here goes anyway. :)

mod_rewrite reaches a point where using it the old fashioned way with regular expressions becomes annoying. I suggest you skip all the pain and swap to using an external program/script to do your rewrites. I wouldn't suggest you do rewrites on all files using this method, but instead just for the urls that most users will see and type. As long as you know how to write efficient code you can even redirect to a php script to do the rewrites (as I have done in the past on a very high traffic site) and it will not have a noticeable effect on load times. If you ever reach a point where the rewrites are the main thing slowing down your site you can then switch it out for a program written in a quicker language, however I'd be surprised if you reach that.

Some things be aware of:

• You need to set a rewrite lock directive or you will get lots of crazy output.
• Remember that the rewrite script is a command line PHP script. It has no knowledge of things such as the $_SERVER global. This is surprisingly easy to forget.
• This script is loaded at server start so any changes to it require a server restart before they take effect.
• Always test this on the command line by passing a url and checking the output before restarting the server. If your script is broken restarting the server will result in anything from non functioning rewrites to the server not starting at all.

It a bit more hassle in the beginning, but once you have set this up you will find adding new rewrite rules to be an absolute breeze and a hell of a lot more flexible.

Here is the only tutorial I was able to find on how to do this using PHP...

Using MySQL to control mod_rewrite via PHP

This is far from the standard way of doing rewrites so I imagine I'm going to cop a lot of flack for this answer. Oh well. :)

Answer 4

In answer to your bounty question I would use this:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^([A-Z]{2}\/)*(([A-Z]+\/)*)([A-Z]+)\.html$ index.php?lang=$1&parents=$2&pagelink=$4 [NC,QSA,L]

Since you want to be able to handle any number of generations/levels in your URL, have you thought about how you want to catch them in you PHP script?

You definitely don't want to be going and checking isset($_GET['parent1']);isset($_GET['parent2']) etc etc etc.

As some of the other responses have indicated, you really need to be parsing your URL inside your PHP script; to that end, my RewriteRule hands off the entire 'parents' section of the URL, which your script can then explode and parse; but doesn't interfere with normal no-parent urls. =)

Answer 5

If I were you, I would use something like this:

.htaccess:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !/main.php$
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z]{2})?(.*)$ main.php?lang=$1&path=$2 [L,QSA]

main.php:

$langs = array('en','de','ru'); // list of supported languages
$currentLang = isset($_GET['lang'])&&in_array($_GET['lang']) ? $_GET['lang'] : $defaultLang; // current selected language
$path = $_GET['path']; // current path

Then, in main.php you may parser path according to your needs