This is easy enough to do, but of course, you need to tell index.php which page you want so you end up with URL like http://www.deaconsworld.org.uk/index.php?PageID=12 or  http://www.deaconsworld.org.uk/index.php?PageID=36. Not the most user or SEO friendly. What I really wanted was URL that looked like this:  http://www.deaconsworld.org.uk/contact/ or http://www.deaconsworld.org.uk/about/

It turns out that it was actually quite simple. The principle behind it is to use a Apache re-write to redirect everything that isn’t a ‘real’ page to index.php but leave the URI available for php to process.

Let’s say you have a database called tblPages that looks like this:

+-----------+-------------------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| Field     | Type                    | Null | Key | Default | Extra          |
+-----------+-------------------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| PageID    | int(10) unsigned        | NO   | PRI | NULL    | auto_increment |
| Title     | varchar(255)            | NO   |     | NULL    |                |
| Content   | text                    | NO   |     | NULL    |                |
+-----------+-------------------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+

Hopefully the table is self explanatory, The PageID is a unique number, Title is going to be the URL and Content is the HTML of the page.

Next you need a rewrite statement, this can either be put in the virtualhost declaration or in an .htaccess file. Again this would look like this:

# Switch the rewrite Engine on
RewriteEngine On
# Set the base correctly
RewriteBase /
# Ignore and don't process any 'real' files or directories
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
# finally, rewrite everything else as index.php and stop processing
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

Next comes the magical bit. Although we can now type our URL in as http://www.deaconsworld.org.uk/contact/, Apache will send us to http://www.deaconsworld.org.uk/index.php. However, the $_SERVER[REQUEST_URI] will still contain http://www.deaconsworld.org.uk/contact/

Next we need to do a bit of work in PHP:

PageID=GetPageID($_SERVER[REQUEST_URI]);

$SQL_GetPageInfo=mysql_query
	("SELECT Title,Content FROM tblPages WHERE PageID=$PageID");
$Details=mysql_fetch_array($SQL_GetPageInfo);

print $Details[Content];

function GetPageID($URI) {
	$PageTitle_array=explode('?', $URI);
	$PageTitle=$PageTitle_array[0];
	$PageTitle=rawurldecode($PageTitle);
	$PageTitle=trim($PageTitle, '/');
	$SQL_GetPageID=mysql_query
		("SELECT PageID from tblPages WHERE Title='$PageTitle'");
	return mysql_result($SQL_GetPageID,0);
}

Again, the code should be pretty self explanatory.

So there you have it. The only things missing are a default page for when some enters http://www.deaconsworld.org.uk and to tidy up the security, but I’ll let you work that one out.

I searched high and low on the net to see if there was a magical way to control the loading order. In the end I found this really elegant solution to load the flash as the last item.

In your style sheet, give the style you want to appear last: display: none;Then in the body tag change the display to block using onload:document.getElementById('audio').style.display = 'block';"

I’ve tested this in Firefox and IE on both Linux and Windows and it seem to work perfectly.

The reason I’ve been thinking up new names is I’ve been testing my latest, greatest app and needed to fill it with test data. I hate thinking of test names. Normally I end up with bob, bob1, bob2 or my favourite piece of test data “rich is gay”. That’s fine if you just want a few test name, but what if you want say 1000 or 2000 or 10,000. That were Benjamin Keen‘s Data Generator comes in. It’s a little script that create random data perfect for shoehorning in to any app you want. It will even output CSV, MySQL, XML, Excel or HTML and best of all it’s GNU

I’ve put a copy at http://www.deaconsworld.org.uk/datagenerator/ to try and save him some bandwidth.

perl -e 'print scalar localtime($ARGV[0]),"\n"' [unixtime] so: perl -e 'print scalar localtime($ARGV[0]),"\n"' 1172160024
Thu Feb 22 16:00:24 2007

If you use this a lot, there’s nothing to stop you putting this in a nice little script, such as:

#!/bin/perl
print scalar localtime($ARGV[0]),"\n"