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Remove reliance on .htaccess URL rewrites | Forum

Topic location: Forum home » Support » General Questions
James Geddes
James Geddes May 11 '15
It is not good that oxwall relies on .htaccess URL rewrites in order to function. It is non-standard and makes using it along side something else very difficult.


Almost every other CMS, including wordpress and mediawiki for example, works without any rewrites, then allows the user to customise the URL format if necessary. This is how oxwall should work as it is the De facto standard in 2015

ross Team
ross May 11 '15
Topic was moved from Bug reports and troubleshooting.
Taissa Team
Taissa May 15 '15
James Geddes, I guess you mean software design pattern when you speak about standards. As known there are several different software design patterns including the front controller pattern. So, the Oxwall software is using the front controller pattern as well as the Wordpress, for example. It is just one of possible standards. Tunnelling all requests through a single entry point is certainly an efficient way to implement a command-based mechanism, which not only allows you to route and dispatch commands to appropriate handlers, but also exposes a flexible structure that can be massaged and scaled without much burden. In the simplest scenario, a naive combination of URL rewriting along with a few switch statements is all we need to route and dispatch requests, though in production it might be necessary to appeal to more complex and granular implementations, especially if we want to distil routing and dispatching processes through finer-grained objects armed with well-segregated responsibilities.

Concerning the .htaccess file this is a configuration file that controls Apache web servers, mod_rewrite is a rewrite engine used by web servers to modify URLs before they load. It is mainly used as an easy way for creating a user friendly query URLs for example to turn dynamic url’s such as www.yoursite.com/product.php?id=123 into static and user friendly url’s such as www.yoursite.com/product/123.

So please specify how exactly you want to modify the URL format. If you would like to change the existing URL somehow, you may use some of existing SEO plugins. You can try searching one in our Store, for example this one: http://www.oxwall.org/store/item/125 .
James Geddes
James Geddes May 21 '15
Again, this is a bug that should stay in the bug reports. Ross, you really have no idea how to encourage a community do you. I'm doing my best to help you here and you just keep telling me to shut up. Thanks - not.


Nothing should rely on a rule that is as generalistic as this in order to work


RewriteRule (.*) index.php


For example, mediawiki works without an .htaccess file. If one wants to, one can then customise the URL format with htaccess, but this is optional.


If I were to delete my oxwall .htaccess file, oxwall would die. What I am saying is that oxwall should follow modern standards and not rely on htaccess and certainly not rely on rules that make it very difficult to use oxwall alongside something else.