User MOD Rewrite
 

This is a pretty simple hack but is designed so that you can access members profiles quickly and / or your members can have an easy link to pass around for their user profile.

STEP 1:

If you don't have one already create a file named .htaccess in your forums root directory.

STEP 2:

Paste the following code within that file:

## Altsounds.com Member re-write Hack Version1
## All music fans should check out altsounds.com for lots of free music to listen to!!

# turn the Apache MOD_REWRITE engine on
RewriteEngine On

# this first rule will catch the "blank" entry into the
# Forums directory, taking the user to the main forum page - change as appropriate
RewriteRule ^$ hangout.php

# this next entry will catch everything else and pass
# it to the member.php engine for processing in
# the "member" section
RewriteRule (^[-_A-Za-z0-9\ ]*$) member.php?&username=$1

That's it! My main forum page is hangout.php. So you should change that within the code above to whatever your forum main page is (usually index.php).

Now all your members links to their profile is {link to forum}/{username} or {link to forum}/{userid} e.g. in my websites case http://hangout.altsounds.com/altsounds or will take you directly to the username "altsounds" user profile. If no profile is available (i.e. a member is not registered) you will get the appropriate error message.

Simple but cool. Hope you all enjoy.

Screenshots?

Well there aren't really any because all this is doing is allowing you to type in username after your forum address to go directly to a users profile making it easy to link to and lookup users profiles.

Rather than having to type in {forumaddress}/member.php?username={username}. Now you can just type {forumname}/{username}.

NOTA: you need MOD_REWRITE to be activated in your Apache installation... not all Hosts permit this... verify before making any complain here that it's not working properly...

Yeah thanks nexialys for that good point. If this hack doesn't work for you it means that you don't have MOD_REWRITE activated in your Apache installation and the hack won't work period.

Problem with this hack, everything under is subjected to it, such as /forums/gallery tells you user has not registered

Not if you place the trailing slash at the end of the directory e.g. /forums/gallery/ will still take you to gallery. No slash takes you to the user profile trailing slash takes you to the driectory you want and, if you link directly to a PHP file that works fine too.

ok, thanks. I will put the trailing slash in the links because I like your hack.

a little modif here, so everyone is happy...:

ifyou want your users to be located also by their userid instead of just their username, change the last line with:

You should always make sure you put the trailing slashes in just to make sure ;). If you installed the hack please click install as this is my first hack and I would love to see how many people actually end up using this hack.