I’ve been thinking about individual features of various code frameworks, starting with two features that are closely related: clean URLs and URL routing. To examine this idea further I started writing a basic implementation of these two features in PHP.
To start with we’ll redirect all requests to a single index.php file. Here’s the .htaccess file:
1.RewriteEngine on
2.RewriteBase /
3.RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
4.RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
5.RewriteRule ^(.*)\?*$ index.php?_route_=$1 [L,QSA]
The idea here is pretty basic, unless the exact file or directory exists redirect the request to index.php. When the redirect happens, add a GET variable (_route_) that contains the directory portion of the URL.
