URL Rewrite to subdomains?

Question

say i have a website with /article.php?id=1&category=Minecraft&Name=Lorem+Ipsum

and /topic.php?category=Minecraft

how would i setup url rewrite to make the topic pages being

minecraft.domain.com

and articles being

minecraft.domain.com/1/Lorem+Ipsum

I couldn't find this how to do this anywhere on the web... well, at least on google

Answer 1

1) On your website, make sure that you generate PROPER URLs, e.g. http://minecraft.domain.com/1/lorem-ipsum instead of /article.php?id=1&category=Minecraft&Name=Lorem+Ipsum

Here, the acceptable characters for the article name is:

• any latin characters (can be mixed case, but I would recommend to have all lower case)
• digits
• underscore char _
• minus char -

Any other characters should be replaced by -. If during URL normalisation you end up with more that 1 - character next to each other -- remove such extra chars. The article name should not start or end with - or _.

Example of normalisation process (step-by-step):

• Oops! I did it again! -- initial text
• oops--i-did-it-again- -- after replacing unwanted characters by -
• oops-i-did-it-again- -- removing duplicated - characters
• oops-i-did-it-again -- final sting after removing trailing -

2) Setup your subdomain minecraft.domain.com to point into the same root folder as domain.com

3) Add these rules into your .htaccess

# Activate Rewrite Engine
RewriteEngine On
# Do not do anything for already existing files
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule .+ - [L]
# rewrite root (topic) hit
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^minecraft\.domain\.com$
RewriteRule ^$ /topic.php?category=Minecraft [QSA,L]
# rewrite article hits
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^minecraft\.domain\.com$
RewriteRule ^(\d+)/([a-z0-9\-_]+)$ /article.php?id=$1&category=Minecraft&Name=$2 [NC,QSA,L]

These rules will do these rewrites:

minecraft.domain.com => /topic.php?category=Minecraft

minecraft.domain.com/1/lorem-ipsum => /article.php?id=1&category=Minecraft&Name=lorem-ipsum

---

UPDATE:

These rules will work for any subdomains (including www.domain.com) -- replace last 6 lines from previous snippet:

# rewrite root (topic) hit
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^([a-z0-9\-]+)\.domain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^$ /topic.php?category=%1 [QSA,L]
# rewrite article hits
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^([a-z0-9\-]+)\.domain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(\d+)/([a-z0-9\-_]+)$ /article.php?id=$1&category=%1&Name=$2 [NC,QSA,L]

It is YOUR responsibility to generate PROPER URLs. The above rules will make these NICE urls working.