[vox-tech] Question related to Apache mod_rewrite and regular expressions

[Brian Lavender]

Dave,

You might take a look at Django. It does url rewriting automatically, not
sure how though. It may be worth a look, especially the test application
listed below. Kyle Ambroff gave a great presentation on Django a couple
years back at an ACM meeting at Sac State. Maybe we could twist his
arm into giving one at Lugod. I definitely intend to configure a django
server, probably after this semester is over though. ;-)

I see several Django books on Safari.
http://proquest.safaribooksonline.com

Python Web Development with Django® 
By: Jeff Forcier; Paul Bissex; Wesley Chun

Sams Teach Yourself Django in 24 Hours
By: Brad Dayley

The Definitive Guide to Django: Web Development Done Right
By: Adrian Holovaty; Jacob Kaplan-Moss


Excerpted from the following book on Chapter 4.
An Introduction to Testing Web Applications with twill and Selenium
by C. Titus Brown; Gheorghe Gheorghiu; Jason Huggins

4.1.1. Installing and running the poll application

   1.

      Install Django (see (http://www.djangoproject.com/documentation/install/)).
   2.

      Download the demonstration app, at (http://webtesting.idyll.org/resources/django-poll.zip).
   3.

      Unpack django-poll.zip (it will unpack into a subdirectory named django-poll) and change into the mysite sub-directory.
   4.

      Run python manage.py runserver. It will start a web server on http://localhost:8000; to make sure that it is running, visit http://localhost:8000/polls.


brian

On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 10:14:45AM -0700, David Spencer, Internet Handyman wrote:
> Harold, that worked perfectly! Thanks so much!!
> 
> In looking at the results, I was wondering if it's possible to "hide"
> the resulting URL for SEO purposes? In other words, when the link is
> to product-Another-Thing.php, the URL changes internally to
> product.php?name=Another-Thing but it doesn't update in the location
> string. I've slogged about with it this morning, but as usual, all
> I've managed to do is break it. Any further ideas?
> 
> Thanks again,
> 
> 
> -- Dave Spencer, PageWeavers
> 
> On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 3:36 PM, David Spencer <spencer at pageweavers.com>wrote:
> 
> > I've killed the better part of the morning and this afternon trying to
> > figure out this use of Apache's mod_rewrite.
> 
> 
> Welcome to mod_rewrite. There's a logging facility that can create a log of
> which rules were tried, but it doesn't help in this case where you only have
> one rule.
> 
> 
> > RewriteEngine On
> > RewriteRule ^/?product-([A-Za-z0-9-]+)\.php$ product.php?name=$1 [ R=301,L]
> >
> 
> You did a gread job here, but ...
> 
> 1) No spaces in the [] at the end of the line, so you want [R=301,L]
> 
> 2) I found I needed to add this option also:
> Options +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
> 
> 3) You almost certainly also want QSA (query string append), making it
> [R=301,L,QSA] at the end of the line. This will add the name parameter to
> whatever other parameters were sent, instead of dropping the original
> parameters:
> 
>     product-a.php?quantity=4 -> product.php?name=a&quantity=4
> 
> You can check Apache's error_log if this still isn't working for hints.
> 
> Harold
> _______________________________________________
> vox-tech mailing list
> vox-tech at lists.lugod.org
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-- 
Brian Lavender
http://www.brie.com/brian/