PHP - Alter URL to hide querystring and display page title instead

Question

I have a selection of pages which currently have a url which looks something like this:

www.mydomain.com/directory/?id=123

This displays a story from a mySQL table with the id of 123.

What I would like to know is whether it is possible to alter the appearance of the URL to look something like this:

www.mydomain.com/directory/story-title

I have the following page code...

<?php 

header('Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8'); 
include $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].'/con.php';
$id = $_GET['id'];
$query = "SELECT * FROM mytable WHERE id = $id";
$result = $mysqli->query($query);

if ($mysqli->error) {
   printf("Errormessage: %s\n", $mysqli->error);
}

$row = $result->fetch_array(MYSQLI_BOTH);

echo $row['title'];

?>

And the following in my .htaccess file:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^directory/(.*)/?$ /directory/index.php?id=$1

The original URL works fine, but not the new one.

Answer 1

You cannot hide a variable in the URL if it is going to change from page to page... If the 'story-title' is unique for each page (it is a primary key in the database), then you can simple do an .htaccess rewrite and use the 'story-title' as the id.

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^directory/(.*)$ directory/page.php?story=$1

However, if the 'story-title' is not unique then you will have to implement a different sort of rewrite that uses the id but also displays the story title. Exactly how SO does it.

The following will rewrite this:

www.domain.com/directory/ID/STORY_TITLE/

to

www.domain.com/directory/page.php?id=ID

.htacess (not tested):

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^directory/(.*)/(.*)/?$ directory/page.php?id=$1&story=$2

Answer 2

store story title in database and pass it ( story=story-title ) in URL instead of id=123

then write following .htaccess code

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^directory/(.*)$ directory/index.php?story=$1

now you can access www.mydomain.com/directory/?id=123 from www.mydomain.com/directory/story-title

Answer 3

I do not precicely know about it, but here is something what I read someday.

A special string is used as a title and ID at the same time. It is also called "slug". Slugs must be unique in your database.

Structure:

Title       | Text     | Slug            | ID
------------+----------+-----------------+--------
"Big title" |"HTML etc"| "story-title"   | 5

So you just use that slug to find a needed article.