How to hide the website address

[hihidavid]

Hi,

I am going to build up a online shop and selling some products,

the site is developed using php and i would like to hide the filename of the name, e.g.

from

www.mysite.com/car/list1.php


to

www.mysite.com/car/


how can i do?

thanks

[Matthew1980]

Hi there hihidavid,

The word you are after is mod_rewrite this is used to mask the technology used and is good to make urls seo friendly.

Give the apache forum a try as it is a module on there. Hope that helps.

Cheers.
MRb

[rocknbil]

And before you look, this is "the most common mistake" - this is backwards.

www.mysite.com/car/list1.php
to
www.mysite.com/car/

You write from the link, www.mysite.com/car/ to the script, www.mysite.com/car/list1.php

RewriteRule ^/car\/*$ /car/list1.php [L]

Of course, one wouldn't hard code it like that, you'd use some sort of regexp to manage hundreds of URL's with one or two lines, but that's the idea . . .

[capulet_x]

I just wanted to put it out there that you could design your site with CSS and use javascript to load new content into a centrally located div . Your page address will appear unchanged. and you can accomplish this without the use of frames.
Just a thought.

[Matthew1980]

Hi there capulet_x,

>>I just wanted to put it out there that you could design your site with CSS and use javascript to load new content into a centrally located div

Interesting, though I would think a tad impractical, especially when you consider that a lot of people nowadays turn of JS because of all the pop-ups and other intrusions that come from sites, the easiest way to go with this is from a server-side using rewrite rules.

Cheers,
MRb

[mack]

also, by having all pages loaded onto one page, how would search engines be able to crawl the specific pages, when they all use the same address in the url bar. Use a method where each page has a unique url.

Mack.

[capulet_x]

I agree with you guys and I admit that there was a trade-off with the proposed solution. I think that is why I hesitated to post it but I know I've also been in situations where I just need to have something online even if I had to continue developing it to function optimally. That being said, I haven't had the same experience in my browser choices with pop-up issues or unwanted javascript executing and so it didn't occur to me that "a lot of people nowadays turn off JS" but I will consider that factor in the future.

[g1smd]

Using extensionless URLs with a matching rewrite is the way to go.