[The Piper]

I've been using Logician's WEBTEMPLATES hack for the longest time for several pages on my website, it's one of the greatest hacks ever developed (along with vbHome (lite) and vbMicroStats, IMHO). However, I've never really liked the format of the URLs with the WEBTEMPLATES hack.

URLs right now look like this: http://www.pinkfloydfan.net/show.php?pg=books

The problem is, search engines, specially Google, don't seem to like URLs with parameters passed through them, such as the "?pg=books" part.

So, after some research, I found out how to use Apache's .htaccess to have search-engine friendly links.

First, make sure your server has the Apache module mod_rewrite installed..

Open .htaccess, and add:

RewriteEngine on 
RewriteRule ^books\.php$ show.php?pg=books [NC]
RewriteRule ^posters\.php$ show.php?pg=posters [NC]

You can change the first part (^books\.php$) to whatever file name you would like your webtemplate to have, including a .html extension, such as ^this_is_my_books_page\.html$. Add as many lines as you wish/need. I have as many lines as webtemplates, so now all of them are search-engine friendly.

Also, make sure that if you already have a "RewriteEngine on" line on your .htaccess, that you don't add a second one.

Check it out for yourself: http://www.pinkfloydfan.net/books.php. It takes you to the same WEBTEMPLATE as the previous URL.

Just thought I'd share this with you. Logician, again, congrats on this great hack. I hope you keep on developing it. One thing I'd like to see that shouldn't be too hard to implement is a "Search" function for WEBTEMPLATES, much like we have for the Templates on VB's Admin CP.

I'm also having problems with the Who's Online hack you just posted a few posts back, much like other users. Would you please be so kind as to double check to see if your instructions are precise? Thanks a lot!