.htaccess and seo-friendly urls

Question

We have an ecommerce site right now that carries a range of brands. The brand pages carry urls as follows:

1. http://www..com/catalog/brand/vi

Answer 1

The apache feature you are looking for is called mod_rewrite. You should be able to google and find good resources for help here.

The basic idea is you'll specify a regular expression matching and then a replacement pattern. You can set it to do a 301 redirect, but the default is to not redirect the user, just access the re-written url.

Here's an example:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule (.*) index.php

The RewriteRule says to rewrite any matching url(.*) to index.php. This is not particularly useful for most files. I'm sure you'll have plenty of examples as this is a common problem.