What is URL rewriting?

URL rewriting is a process where dynamic web pages, or scripts, mimic the more traditional URL structure of static file requests on a web server.  They do this for several reasons, but predominantly for the following two:

Making URLs easier to remember

Consider the following URL:

http://www.example.com/index.php?page=products

Wouldn't it be easier to remember if we could just say this:

http://www.example.com/index/products

This is the first change that Sitellite makes.  All web pages in Sitellite are created equal, in that they all get top-level names, so that they are all equally easy to remember.

Later we will look at how Sitellite extends this idea in ways that may not be as easy to remember, however by using pages as aliases of boxes and forms, we can achieve exactly the same thing even in these scenarios.

Fooling search engines

Traditionally, search engines that employ web site crawlers have rejected dynamic web pages, so any page with a .pl, .cgi, .php, .asp, etc., and any page that had a question mark (?) in the URL, would not appear in those search engines.

This was a problem for businesses who wanted search engine exposure, but also wanted to employ more dynamic techniques on their web sites.  This is probably the bigger reason why URL rewriting became so popular, and why it still is.

The state of search engines has changed in the recent past, but not by much.  While sites like google.com DO list dynamic pages, they often mark them at a disadvantage in ranking over static pages.  So URL rewriting is still very much an important part of a CMSes functionality.

Page 1: What is URL rewriting?
Page 2: Basic conversions
Page 3: Calling boxes from the URL
Page 4: Calling forms from the URL
Page 5: Referring to the URL components using the Sitellite API

All Tutorials