Mod_rewrite tutorial for vB3
 

I've written a detailed tutorial for vBulletin 3 how to go about using mod_rewrite to allow your forum to have clean URLs. It goes so far as to give forum URLs names such as forum-name.html instead of forum-IDnumber.html

It's available here: http://www.daniweb.com/techtalkforums/thread9379.html

I hope that you enjoy it!

Hi dani,

Please could you post the tutorial here, so in the event your site goes down our users aren't left stranded. Thankyou

At this time, I would rather not spread my tutorial around to other sites. As I just wrote it late last night, I am still getting a lot of feedback about it, and therefore I keep making updates and revisions to the tutorial. (There have actually been 3 changes in the past 2 hours!) For that reason, I would rather keep it all in one place. In addition, I might as well just come out and say that the only reason I decided to share my technique (via the tutorial) was to hopefully draw some attention to my web development and SEO forums.

Thanks cscgal! Just what I was looking for! :)

Registered at your site also, looks like a good place to be...

There's really no need to rewrite the URL's in your vBulletin. The spiders have no problems interpreting the default query string. Also they have no problems spidering the archive :)

Thanks hpwilhem. Dean C, I've actually seen this argument sooo many times ;) But, hey, I think it really helps a lot, and so does my SEO guy :) so that's all that matters :)

Hey there fellas. I just want to give you an update on the DaniWeb mod_rewrite hack - I've updated it to what DaniWeb is currently using, in a whole new tutorial. There is support for multiple pages, Who's Online (no more Unknown locations!), previous / next threads, linear / hybrid / threaded modes, and much more! Enjoy :)

http://www.daniweb.com/tutorials/tutorial22840.html

Can someone shed some light for me, as far as what this hack actually does? I checked Daniweb and I can find no such description.

Thanks

It rewrites the forum URLs so that they are cleaner. For example:

http://www.daniweb.com/techtalkforum...read.php?t=123

is now written as

http://www.daniweb.com/techtalkforums/thread123.html

The advantage of this is much better spiderability by search engines, since it fools the search engines into thinking you have static HTML pages instead of dynamic PHP pages with query strings.

Thank you for your quick response.

Rgds