Yahoo hosting, no htaccess, and permalinks
January 21, 2009 @ 3:08pm
by Rob Sanchez
So everyone wants clean permalinks these days; those search engine friendly URLs are everywhere (even on our own site!), and made ubiquitous by Wordpress and other CMSes. The usual technique is to use Apache’s mod_rewrite module and an htaccess file to re-write the URLs (see here). But what if you can’t use an htaccess file? Well, I found out recently that Yahoo Small Business hosting does not allow htaccess files, at all, and I had to find a solution for that.
The solution for me? PATH_INFO, an environment variable in Apache, which is basically extra “information” at the end of a file path/URL. So if you have a URL like “www.xyz.com/index.php/permalink/” the PATH_INFO would be “/permalink/”. In PHP, it’s available in the $_SERVER global:
<?php
$path_info = explode('/', $_SERVER['PATH_INFO']);
// start parsing $path_info however you see fit
?>
Now, we already had a custom engine for using handling the mod_rewrite output, and I was able to use that parsed URL data and put it into our system. And have some nice-looking permalinks. There was a small compromise in having that extra “/index.php” in the URL, but I think it is still worth doing and better than no clean permalinks at all.
Tags
apache, htaccess, mod_rewrite, path_info, permalinks, PHP, yahoo
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Obama’s New Whitehouse.gov
January 20, 2009 @ 12:06pm
Updated — January 20, 2009 @ 1:51pm
by Rob Sanchez
If you haven’t noticed yet, the new White House website debuted today. It has a modern, classy look, similar to the Obama campaign website. The site features a blog; not sure if President Obama himself will be blogging, though. It also looks like the site will host a weekly video address from the President. Looked at the source code, and yes, they are using my favorite, jQuery! Nicely done.
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Using Template Tags In Wordpress Widgets
January 1, 2009 @ 6:23pm
by Rob Sanchez
When working on our Wordpress theme here, I was looking for a way to create a more custom widget than the default Categories widget, without having much know-how when it comes to Wordpress plugin design. But Google comes to the rescue: this great tutorial from Lonewolf Online on how to create a simple, custom plugin w/ widget. Then you can go crazy with template tags in widgets, even if you are not a pro with plugin creation.
