Web address PHP redirect

Question

I am currently working on a social networking website, and I would like the user to be able to enter the web address of another user and be redirected to his profile. The thing is, every existing user has a column in a mySQL DataBase, which specifies what page templates does he use, and the data to be inputted into this template. How can i Possibly make it so that when he inputs of example : http://www.emuze.co/users/@bob_marly (it can have a .PHP/ .HTML suffix after it), the website will query the Database, find the template, redirect to that templates page (eg http://www.emuze.co/temps/temp1.0.php ) and use the users that a from the mySQL Database? I know its a very long and complicated question, but i would really appreciate any help! thanks a lot! :@

Answer 1

If I understood your question right, you mean this:

So user A wants to see the site from user B. User A has template T_A, user B has template T_B. User A goes to www.emuze.co/users/B and watches it using template T_A.

If this is right, do it like this: Read out the data from user B from the database. Load the watchings user profile, check wich template he is using and then render the site using the template (in this cast T_A) and the data of the user (B).

Very easy example:

user database:

|Name  | Information       | Template
_______________________________________
|A     |I'm user A         | T_A
|B     |I'm user B         | T_B

Templates: T_A:

   "Hey, I am %NAME%, Some Infos about me: %INFORMATION%"

T_B:

   "Name: $NAME", Information: %INFORMATION"

User A wants to look at User B:

Get user B's values from db
Get user A's Template
replace `%NAME%` and `%INFORMATION%`
print it

UPDATE:

I think what you need is some mod_rewrite (under Apache, under IIS use rewrite rules), wich maps http://example.com/users/bob_marley to http://example.com/users/index.php?user=bob_marley . Using this you always get to that site and can do anything there.

You should not use a real existing file per user, but one wich gets params like this. And you should use a template system, so you can echo a templete everywhere without redirecting users.

Answer 2

You should give each user a row instead of a column, within a table that specifies which template is used for each user.

For example, you would have the "templates"-table, with the columns "UserID", "Username" and "Template". Then, the table would look something like this:

+--------+----------+----------+
| UserID | Username | Template |
+--------+----------+----------+
|      1 | John     | temp1.0  |
|      2 | Paul     | temp1.1  |
|      3 | Eric     | temp1.0  |
|      4 | Frank    | temp1.2  |
+--------+----------+----------+

...and soforth.

Then you'd have to query which template a user has. For example, to know which template the user with UserID '3' uses, assuming your mysql connection resource is stored in the variable $link:

$query = "SELECT * FROM templates WHERE UserID=3";
$result = $link->query($query);
$row = $result->fetch_assoc();

$row['Template'] will result 'temp1.0' which you could use for including a specific CSS-stylesheet, including specific PHP-files or whatever, but you can also retrieve all other user-specific information such as $row['Username']. No need for redirections.