Multiple vanity URLs for different php files?

Question

I am trying to build a site which has the following pages which needs vanity urls,

• account.php
• questions.php
• profile.php

I need to display

www.mysite.com/account?req=settings
www.mysite.com/account?req=questions
www.mysite.com/account?req=answers

as following

www.mysite.com/account/settings
www.mysite.com/account/questions
www.mysite.com/account/answers

And for the other files I need the following,

etc:- www.mysite.com/questions?id=0484684

As

www.mysite.com/questions/0484684

And

www.mysite.com/profile?id=123456

as

www.mysite.com/profile/123456

Would anyone help me because I really need to make this possible.

I would like to remove the .php extention from the url too.

I like to say that I have no experience in htaccess files.

Thanks for the help, it worked !!!

Answer 1

In your .htaccess file, add these rules:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /

RewriteRule ^account/([^/\.]+)/?$ account.php?req=$1 [L,NC,QSA]
RewriteRule ^questions/([^/\.]+)/?$ questions.php?id=$1 [L,NC,QSA]
RewriteRule ^profile/([^/\.]+)/?$ profile.php?id=$1 [L,NC,QSA]

You should be able to add new rules based on how these work if you need them in the future.

Answer 2

You'll want to use a .htaccess file combined with PHP for complex manipulations like that, I wrote an article on re-writing URLs after asking a similar question on SO:

http://tomsbigbox.com/elegant-url-rewriting/