25.5. How to make PHP-Nuke search engine friendly

To create a search engine friendly PHP-Nuke site, you need a means of converting dynamic URLs to static ones. How can this be done? For example, you could convert

http://www.yourdomain.com/modules.php?name=Your_Account&op=userinfo&username=chris

to

http://www.yourdomain.com/userinfo-chris.html

Notice that the spider-friendly format contains no indication that there are any parameters being passed at all. Rather, it simply looks like we are trying to access the file userinfo-chris.html on www.yourdomain.com, and this will not present any problems to the search engine spiders. We have of course to track this case down and use such a "file" accordingly, i.e split it internally into its parts, determine the parameter-value pairs and the name of the script to execute and pass the parameters (name=Your_Account, op=edituser, username=chris) to that script (modules.php) for execution.

We will describe GoogleTap, an ingenious solution to this problem, that combines the components we saw in the previous sections:

• mod_rewrite (Section 25.2),

• regular expressions (Section 25.3),

• .htacces file (Section 25.4).

	Frontpage extensions will not work!
	This does not need to upset you, since PHP-Nuke does not use Frontpage extensions. But for the sake of completeness, be warned that if you use Frontpage extensions, mod_rewrite will not work! Of course, if your ISP has installed them, but you don't use them, you also don't need to worry.