Custom CMS, pretty permalinks like commercial CMS

Question

I am currently whipping up a very basic CMS for a personal project of mine. It is as much for my own education as anything. One question I have is how do I achieve url's / permalinks without file extentions. I understand using get variables to pull data from the DB but how do you convert this to something like www.url.com/posttitle instead of something like www.url.com/?posttitle='blablabla.

Also on a slightly different topic can anyone point me in the direction of an EASY to use framework for developing sites that deal with memberships and member listings eg craigslist.

I currently develop within wordpress and am quite capable but am less familiar with OOPHP and custom CMS development from a base level.

Thanks in advance for any help or suggestions.

Answer 1

You'd use a .htaccess file to pass all requests to your front controller (which is usually just an index.php script) and then that script matches the incoming request to a record in your database.

For example, if you had a database table called pages with four columns: id, title, slug and content, the following would be a simple implementation…

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^(.+)$ index.php/$1 [NC,L]

This tells Apache to take all requests that aren't a file or a direction and send them to index.php.

Your index.php could then look as follows:

<?php
// Take request URI
// Would be something like 'your-slug'
$request = trim($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], '/');

// Set up database connection and attempt to match slug
$sql = "SELECT * FROM pages WHERE slug = ? LIMIT 1";
$smt = $db->prepare($sql);
$smt->execute(array($request));

$page = $smt->fetchObject();

if (! $page) {
    // Page was not found matching slug
    header('HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found');
    exit;
}

// Display matching page in a template

From here, you can then build upon it.