Website Designers and Webmasters

If you are not familiar with htaccess, you are missing out. It is one of the greatest things about linux/php hosting. One little file that gives you a wide range of control. Here is one of the most useful parts of htaccess:

Redirecting Many Pages From .html to .php (or “/”) at Once

Today, I am finishing converting a static, HTML website to Wordpress. So all 58 pages that used to be /page.html are now /page/ and it would be a pain to go through all of the .html pages and force redirects to their new page. I found this page on Web Weaver that explains this well:

Changed file extension?

This example is perfect if you’ve decided to switch to .php from .html pages. It will look for any .html page and redirect it to .php (ie http://www.example.com/yourpage.html and redirect it to http://www.example.com/yourpage.php). Now, be careful with this, it does mean any html page. I did this on one of my sites and had totally forgotten I had an iframe with .html content on some pages… I didn’t notice for weeks that it was broken :S.
So learn from my mistake check, double check, then check again.

RedirectMatch 301 (.*)\.html$ http://www.example.com$1.php

In my case, I put most of the pages into a subfolder (and without .php) so my htaccess redirect looks like this (example website for placeholder):

RedirectMatch 301 (.*)\.html$ http://www.websitesinaflash.com/website-services$1/

In this example, the $1 get’s replaced with everything from the (.*) which is everything after the domain name and before the .html.

Enjoy,
Ashton Sanders

Making a folder secure on your website may seem like a difficult job. Thanks to Phoenix Development, there is a step by step process that will teach you how to make any folder secure.

I found this great blog post about Adding Password Protection to your Website that is very easy to understand, and will help you to easily use .htaccess to secure a folder on your website.

-Keep it secure,
-Ashton Sanders

I’ve recently been transferring a website to a Linux Plesk Server. I’ve run into a couple problems, and I’ll be adding notes here on my blog.

.htaccess Notes:

If you have a line of “options” (ie. Options Indexes FollowSymLinks Includes), you should separate each option out into it’s own line. The .htaccess line should look like this:

Options +Indexes
Options +FollowSymLinks
Options +Includes

-Ashton Sanders

I went into more detail about what the different processes are of adding php to a website programmed with *.html pages in this earlier htaccess post.

Here are a few more .htaccess lines that will enable php on your server. (Different servers require a different line of code.)

AddType application/x-httpd-php .html .htm

AddType x-mapp-php5 .html .htm

AddHandler application/x-php .html .htm

AddHandler x-httpd-php5 .html .htm

AddHandler x-httpd-php .html .htm

Check out my other .htaccess posts.

-Ashton Sanders

There is a very common problem when trying to upgrade sites made by “newbie” website developers or when you realize that html isn’t the only language on the internet, and you need to upgrade your site.

Problem:

You have a site where every page has a *.html or *.htm extension, and you want to add a dynamic, server-side programming language like PHP.

Solution #1:

Go through your entire site, and change every file name to a *.php extension. Then go through every page and correct all of the hyper links. Then do testing on your entire site to ensure that you haven’t missed any links. Also, if you know anything about search engine optimization and websites, you’ll know you need to create 301 redirects from your old pages to your new so that you don’t lose any Rankings you may have gained. Then you have more testing to do to make sure all of your 301 redirects work….

Solution #2

Add this one line of Code into your .htaccess:

AddHandler x-httpd-php5 .php .htm .html

That’s all it takes to add PHP to my html files?

Yep, that’s it. That little line of code has saved me hundreds of hours of work, and I’m sure it’s not as commonly known as it should be.

-Spread the Wealth
-Ashton Sanders