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.

tablesorter is a jQuery plugin for turning a standard HTML table with THEAD and TBODY tags into a sortable table without page refreshes. tablesorter can successfully parse and sort many types of data including linked data in a cell.

I didn’t bother to try it out, though. I guess I didn’t really believe that it could work so easily.

Here I am months later, in need of some table sorting. So I went ahead and tried it. And it JUST WORKED. As advertised. I did not have to jump through any configuration hoops. Cross-browser? No problem. Developers, this plugin will save you time. Props to Christian Bach who created this plugin.