Im trying to wrap my head around how a php based online catalog works.
Firstly, you establish your categories in a database and display them by calling each row. So for the example we will use the category of dogs. When you select the dog category you run a query which returns each product listed under dogs and you then display each row for the product list. When you select a product you are essentially selecting a row in the database which you then display that information for (product name, description, etc).
Now I think my difficulty is the product urls. Say I select the dog named Abby how do I produce a url like http://www.dogsforsale.com/Abby. For some reason I am finding it difficult to understand this concept without knowing how to establish a unique url for each product. Is it simple created based off the criteria I use to identify each row (Normally the primary key) or can I create a column named product url and assign that as the url?
Trying to understand the basis of php for an online catalog
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Re: Trying to understand the basis of php for an online catalog
Those are called clean-URLs. You should be directing traffic into one script that will accept a variable (or more) describing what page / product should appear. The most common way to achieve this is using apache's mod_rewrite
http://wettone.com/code/clean-urls
http://wettone.com/code/clean-urls
Re: Trying to understand the basis of php for an online catalog
Forgive me, I see how that could change a url to be cleaner but could I make it change an items url to match that of a sql cell?
Re: Trying to understand the basis of php for an online catalog
The script should get the variable from the URL and fetch the required row from the databaseYou should be directing traffic into one script that will accept a variable (or more) describing what page / product should appear.