Virtual Directories help needed

[scottybowl]

Hi,

Just a quick overview before I get down to the nitty gritty.

I am developing a website which is membership based - i.e people can register on the site. I want each member to have their own "page". For example, let's say user "tomjones" registers with the site, I want them to be able to go to www.mysite.com/tomjones and have it display their page.

Obviously, the original way would be to do something like www.mysite.com/memberspage.php?id=tomjones

It's messy, hard for the member to remember, and not good for search engine optimisation.

I do not have root access on my host (i.e the ability to alter the Apache configuration) so that is not an option. I've been looking into htaccess modification but can't find anything that seems to match what I want to do.

In addition, what happens if I have some REAL folders? eg. www.mysite.com/stats. I wouldnt want any scripts to think "stats" was a user page..

I would appreciate any help that you can give me, whether it be a link to a tutorial or giving me a bit of advice on this forum.

Thanks in advance

Scott

[Xnuiem]

You have a couple of ways to go...

first, try mod_rewrite . Its an apache module that may be installed. if not, there are other methods....

Creating actual directories is a good way to go, just create an array somewhere in your software that holds the names of all the reserved ones that way you dont create/delete those.

Spiders wont find your system directories, like stats, unless there is a link to them, so dont worry about that.