Pretty URLs without mod_rewrite, without .htaccess

Question

Without a possibility to access .htaccess I find myself in a creative impasse. There is no mod_rewriting for me. Nevertheless, I want to be able to do the n

Answer 1

If you've the permissions to set custom error documents for your server you could use this to redirect 404 requests.

E.g. for Apache (http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/core.html#errordocument)

ErrorDocument 404 /index.php

In the index.php you then can proceed your request by using data from the $_SERVER array.

Answer 2

I know this question is very old but I didn't see anyone else suggest this possible solution...

You can get very close to what you want just by adding a question mark after the domain part of the URL, ie;

http://www.example.com/?Blog/2009/12/10/
http://www.example.com/?Title_Of_This_Page

Both of the above HTTP requests will now be handled by the same PHP script;

www.example.com/index.php

and in the index.php script, $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] for the two pages above will be respectively;

Blog/2009/12/10/

Title_Of_This_Page

so you can handle them however you want.

Answer 3

The only way is to use custom 404 page. You have no possibility to interpret extensionless files with PHP interpreter without reconfiguring the web server's MIME-types. But you say that you can't edit even .htaccess, so there's no other way.

Answer 4

If you omit a trailing slash, Apache will serve the first file [alphabetically] which matches that name, regardless of the extension, at least on the 2 servers I have access to.

I don't know how you might use this to solve your problem, but it may be useful at some point.

For example if http://www.somesite.com/abc.html and http://www.somesite.com/abc.php both exist and http://www.somesite.com/abc is requested, http://www.somesite.com/abc.html will be served.

Answer 5

You can write a URI class which parses the user-friendly URL you defined.

Answer 6

If the MultiViews option is enabled or you can convince whoever holds the keys to enable it, you can make a script called Blog.php that will be passed requests to example.com/Blog/foo and get '/foo' in the $_SERVER['PATH_INFO'].