.htaccess url rewrites for white label sites

Question

I'm building a simple site that will only have a homepage and a contact page and wondered if I could use .htaccess to rewrite the urls for different companies.

So for example if I go to website.com/companyname-contact/ it will display that url in the browser bar but actually load a generic contact.php page, I can then use php to pull in the correct contact details for that specific companyname.

This would need to work for different company names (e.g. website.com/anothercompany-contact/) but only work for an array of approved company names.

I realise this may not be possible but I thought I'd ask because i spent about 4 hours this morning Googleing it with no real progress.

Thanks

Answer 1

Unless you want to manually list the approved company names in your .htaccess file (which looks UGLY) I'd suggest this:

RewriteEngine On 


  RewriteRule (.*)-contact$ /contact.php?company_name=$1 [L,QSA,NC]

and then in your contact.php

• determine if valid company name - check db or whatever method you are using. (Make sure to escape the input)
• if not valid you have a couple options:
  • redir to your default 404 page
  • issue an intelligent warning page (ie include suggestions for alternate spelling that is in the db) and set a 404 header. (better IMO)
  • if similar company name in the db possibly redirect to that with a note at the top of the page