htaccess Friendly Urls Rewrite

Question

I sincerely apologize if this is a duplicate. I've looked at so many threads but none seem to apply specifically to what I'm trying to do.. and for some reason, I just have such a difficult time wrapping my brain around .htaccess rewrite rules!

I purchased a php script and after installing it, I create a new post and it works fine.. except of course, it shows: mydomain.com/post.php?id=7

Want I want is to show the title of the post after the .com/

I know some will advise to use a post id or a date or something, but I'd really prefer it to be written as stated. So the end result would be: mydomain.com/this-is-my-first-post

I then want to be able to correctly call this page. I assume this would all be done in the index.php page (which calls the post.php page)?

I found the line in index.php that currently calls the post and it looks like this:

<a href="post.php?id=<?php echo $theArticle['artId']; ?>"><h1><?php echo $theArticle['title']; ?></h1></a>

Is that also what I would need to update?

Thanks for any assistance. I really have tried but I am just not programming minded and struggling mightily!

Answer 1

Your question is a bit too broad, but if you are willing to compromise, you could change the url to something like:

mydomain.com/post/7/the-title-of-post-7

And then you would only need a rewrite rule and no changes in the database retrieving code.

In that case the rewrite rule would look something like:

RewriteRule ^post/(\d+).*$ /post.php?id=$1
                  ^^^^^ capture the number to be used

You would of course also need to rewrite all links to the required format.