NYCPHP Meetup

[inforequest]

Elliotte Harold elharo-at-metalab.unc.edu |nyphp dev/internal group use| 
wrote:

> Kenneth Downs wrote:
>
>> Again, I'm not clear on what you are trying to serve.  We probably 
>> have to back up to the beginning and erase the assumption that PHP 
>> has a one-to-one correspondence between a URL (or page) and a PHP 
>> file.  Having erased that, we have to ask what kind of content you 
>> are trying to serve, then we have to look at PHP examples.
>>
>
> Here's a simple example: a news site backed by a database. URLs like
>
> http://www.example.com/news/2007/07/05
> http://www.example.com/news/2007/07/06
> http://www.example.com/news/2007/07/07
> http://www.example.com/news/2007/07/08
> ...
>
> return pages which contain that day's headlines extracted from the 
> database.
>
> One script, no more, must handle all dates. (I don't really care if 
> there are 2 or 3 scripts, but I do not want to have to write a 
> separate page for each URL. The number of PHP scripts must be finite 
> and fixed. It should not increase with the number of URLs the script 
> services.)
>
> The only way I've ever seen this done in PHP is by using mod_rewrite, 
> though they're a couple of other interesting suggestions in the thread 
> I need to explore further. Do you have a suggestion?
>
Typical MVC front controller. A "news" script like /news/index.php gets 
passed 2007 07 and 05 as params via the front controller, so one script 
handles all news/year/month/day URLs. Most frameworks provide an MVC 
front controller.

For me (a search engine optimizer) the core questions come later... how 
does that MVC front controller handle "exceptions" like:

/news/2007 (missing params) -> should 301 to default URL like 
/news/2007/01/01/ or throw a 404
/news/dfsrdf/07/06 (invalid year) -> 404 error
/news/ -> either 301 to default URL like /news/2007/01/01/ or throw a 404
/news -> 301 redirect to /news/ ? Too much redirection... either 301 to 
default URL like /news/2007/01/01/ or throw a 404
/news/2007/07/07 (no trailing slash) -> 301 to trailing slash version 
/news/2007/07/07/
/news/2007/06/07/whatever (excess params) -> 404

Admittedly, not many PHP coders care about such things. Some actually 
think flexible dispatching is a feature! Imagine that! ;-)

-=john andrews

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