Posted by ChrisW on 07/17/07 11:53

Hi,

I'm developing a very small, basic bespoke MySQL-based website, and
there are effectively 3 ways (as far as I'm aware) to do what I want
to do, but I'd like some opinions on what people think would be best.

Currently, I have the pages included like: www.site.com/index.php?p=about,
www.site.com/index.php?p=contact, and also, for the book include,
www.site.com/index.php?p=book&id=1

The book information is the only information held in the database.
All other pages are just included (an elaborate, long server-side
include I guess!). I could continue this way, but I would much rather
have URLs that make sense, and I can see 2 possible solutions:

1. Use Apache rewrite to make the URLs look 'real' (e.g.
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/urls/)

2. Sort all the current pages to be about.php, contact.php etc., and
write a servlet-type page that actually creates real plain HTML pages
for the information about the books, (e.g. www.site.com/books/book1.html).
My plan is to have user-input to put the book information into the
database, so I assume it would be relatively trivial to actually
create a real page when they have entered the information via an input
page (/input.php, instead of using phpMyAdmin).

I'd be grateful for any comments people might have,

Thanks,
Chris

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