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nginxmime-typesmimezen-carturl-masking

Zen cart using html links, but no html files

I am working with a pre-existing zen-cart site has been worked on over the years by multiple teams. Backtracking through all of the teams is not a viable option. Some of the development teams implemented some hacks, one of them being replacing how zen-cart normally creates links, and I am stuck as to how they did it. For example, zen-cart normally links to a product through a link such as the one below:

http://yoursite.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=67&products_id=823

Instead, this zen-cart installation is doing the following:

http://yoursite.com/item-name-here-p-45-.html?cPath=1_26

I have figured out that the number after p-, in this case 45, is the product ID. However, I am stuck as to what that .html file is actually referencing. I am guessing that it is somehow feeding that data back into the index.php file, and it was done for search engine optimization purposes. The server is using nginx if that makes a difference. I would rather use apache for this site, but I am fine with nginx.

Additionally, there are also links such as: 

http://yoursite.com/sitemap.html

but there is no file called sitemap.html on the entire system. However, there is a file called sitemap.xml

For a myriad of reasons, I can't link to the actual site and I hope you fellow developers can understand that. However, if anyone has any idea as to whats going on here, I would be very interested to know. I will provide what other details I can.

Solution

  • I just figured this out, and I want to share my answer for anyone that stumbles upon this. This was caused by something called Ultimate SEO which masks urls with html links to make them more search engine friendly. The reason there are no actual html files involved is because Ultimate SEO creates a .htaccess file that reads the filename from the URL, and converts it to parameters to be passed to a php file. I just simply disabled Ultimate SEO from the zen-cart admin page. Furthermore, Ultimate SEO is something that is used outside of Zen-Cart, so if you are having the same issue I did, this might be it, or something similar.