Hello guys
I have a question. I have a data base(mysql) with a lot of information in many tables. It is a news system. The urls are generated like somesite.com/news.php?id=34 and then news is displayed according to that ID.

So now what I want to do is generate html pages on the fly from the data base like this forum http://designforums.com/forum/thread364.html . See the thread url is in HTML and shows well. How can I do such thing for my news thing or for any thing else just to reduce the load of mysql on the server?

I appreciate if you post some tutorials or some code which can do such thing . Thanks in advance for your help.

You want to look into mod_rewrite. It's really not too difficult if you have experience with REs, if not lots of people around here can help you.

You probably want a .htaccess something like this:

RewriteRule ^thread([0-9]+)\.html news.php?id=$1

All right I understand that part now . Thank you but do I have to add the url of every news id? That would be pain . I mean when you make a new thread in that forum or another forum which I saw it becomes an html file name extension instantly so how can this be done?

If you want to actually create the HTML files, you'd have to modify the source of the application you're using to do so.

mod_rewrite just tells Apache to redirect a request that matches the rule to a different URL you can construct from the original URL. It'll still call PHP as normal.

Originally posted by kooshin
All right I understand that part now . Thank you but do I have to add the url of every news id? That would be pain . I mean when you make a new thread in that forum or another forum which I saw it becomes an html file name extension instantly so how can this be done?

i doubt there is someone adding every new url :P

it probbly generate 2 -or- more pages:
- the new thread page,
- and the (old) forum page where a new A HREF is placed on,

the thread numbers are probably tracked in a database or a file. so the system doesnt generate two the same pages by mistake

just change link generation code - i think it's the best way

All right guys thank you for the answers :) xelav what do you mean by link generation code? am not getting may be you can post a code. Thank you all. I appreciate your help

kooshin: You only need 1 RewriteRule for all the ID numbers.

Any URL that matches the expression thread([0-9]+)\.html will redirect to the file you specify. For example, thread123.html would display the content of news.php?id=123

So I only need to write RewriteRule ^thread([0-9]+)\.html news.php?id=$1
and anyother page which is generated dynamically will have a SEF url so that the mysql load is reduced? I have to admin am not getting :( .....