Hello!

Recently I was working for a Irish guy who has opened a wordpress blog few months ago. I did the theme for him. Recently he requested me for modifying and/or upgrading the project. One of the project requirements was URL rewriting. For example, there can a URL as follows:
http://www.sitename.com/index.php?group_name=My-Input-Value-Goes-Here

But after rewrite, the URL should look like:
http://www.sitename.com/My-Input-Value-Goes-Here

Well. You see I am passing the variable value in index.php file. But I needed to read the custom URL passed value through another PHP file and that is group.php. My group.php file was inside the theme folder. I am passing the group_name value in index.php file but reading from group.php file. It sounds a bit interesting. Huh?

OK. After browsing several blogs, I came up to writing a custom plugin. Thanks to Google.com and all those people sharing information.

My plugin made me a way so that I could pass a variable value in index.php file but read it from group.php file. This plugin code is available almost everywhere. Here goes my plugin:

<?php
	/*
	Plugin Name: WP Custom URL
	Plugin URI: http://www.tanzilo.com/#
	Description: A plugin to allow parameters to be passed in the URL and recognized by WordPress
	Author: Tanzilo
	Version: 1.0
	Author URI: http://www.tanzilo.com/
	*/
	function flush_rewrite_rules()
	{
		global $wp_rewrite;
		$wp_rewrite->flush_rules();
	}
	function add_rewrite_rules( $wp_rewrite )
	{
		$new_rules = array(
	  		'(.+)' => 'index.php?group_name=' .
			$wp_rewrite->preg_index(1) );
		$wp_rewrite->rules = $new_rules + $wp_rewrite->rules;
	}
	function add_query_vars( $qvars )
	{
		$qvars[] = 'group_name';
		return $qvars;
	}
	function template_redirect_file()
	{
		global $wp_query;
		if ( $wp_query->get('group_name') )
		{
			if (file_exists( TEMPLATEPATH . '/group.php' ))
			{
				include( TEMPLATEPATH . '/group.php' );
				exit;
			}
		}
	}
	add_action('init', 'flush_rewrite_rules');
	add_action('generate_rewrite_rules', 'add_rewrite_rules');
	add_filter('query_vars', 'add_query_vars');
	add_action('template_redirect', 'template_redirect_file');
?>

So, what happens now when I activate this plugin? It does a simple work and that is: when it gets a link as below:
http://www.sitename.com/index.php?group_name=My-Input-Value-Goes-Here

It sends the group_name variable value to group.php file which is in the theme folder. In group.php file, I can catch the variable value and use it anyway I want.

Do you want to see my group.php file too? OK. Here it goes:

	<?php get_header(); ?>
	<?php
		$group_name = $_GET['group_name'];
		$group_name = str_replace('-', ' ', $group_name);
	?>
	<div id="container">
    	<div id="contentLeft">
        	<div id="pageContent">
            	<div id="postTitle"><?php echo $group_name; ?></div>
                <div id="postContent"><?php the_time('F j, Y') ?><br />
                    <ul id="pageGroupLinks">
                        <?php echo getGroupPageLinks($group_name); ?>
                    </ul>
				</div>
                <div id="rssSubscribe">If you enjoyed this post, make sure you
                <a href="<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>">subscribe to our RSS feed!</a>
                </div>
            </div>
        </div>
	<?php get_sidebar(); ?>
    </div>
	<?php get_footer(); ?>

This was half the way winning the battle.

But why? Because the following lines should solve my problem.

	function add_rewrite_rules( $wp_rewrite )
	{
		$new_rules = array(
	  		'(.+)' => 'index.php?group_name=' .
			$wp_rewrite->preg_index(1) );
		$wp_rewrite->rules = $new_rules + $wp_rewrite->rules;
	}

But for any unknown reason it was not working.

So, I had to take help of apache (dot)htaccess file for solving the rest of the part.

I was searching for a helpful blog link and after searching many blogs, I found a similar blog article and here it is:

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum92/6079.htm

In this blog, I found a similar solution and wrote my own based on this code.

# Enable mod_rewrite, start rewrite engine
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
#
# Internally rewrite search engine friendly static URL to dynamic filepath and query
RewriteRule ^product/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/?$ /index.php?product=$1&color=$2&size=$3&texture=$4&maker=$5 [L]
#
# Externally redirect client requests for old dynamic URLs to equivalent new static URLs
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.php\?product=([^&]+)&color=([^&]+)&size=([^&]+)&texture=([^&]+)&maker=([^\ ]+)\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ http://example.com/product/%1/%2/%3/%4/%5? [R=301,L]

Finally my (dot)htaccess file looked like this:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^pages/([^/]+)/?$ /index.php?group_name=$1 [L]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.php\?group_name=([^&amp;]+)\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ http://mobile.ie/pages/%1? [R=301,L] 
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

But I was not 100% perfect but close to the solution. The reason is my URL started looking like this:
http://www.sitename.com/pages/My-Input-Value-Goes-Here

Well. You see I was almost close to the solution. As the buyer wanted like this:
http://www.sitename.com/My-Input-Value-Goes-Here

But I came up with a solution to:
http://www.sitename.com/pages/My-Input-Value-Goes-Here

I believe you can work on it and come to a solution without the extra “pages/” part in the URL. If you find such a solution, please share with me and others who will face similar problem.

Dude! That is all for now.

Thank you for reading.