Damn the ?'s and &'s

Every good website should not only be functional, but also look good. Why would that exclude the address bar of the user's browser? It doesn't. Even with dynamic content you can have clean and even uber cool urls for all of your pages. No one wants to see your question marks and ampersands. Even numbers are boring.

You've probably seen this in place already, but of course you never knew how those developers achieved such a task. Which is why you are here. An example of a friendly url would be http://yoursite.com/articles.php/2901/. Compare that to http://yoursite.com/articles.php?articleid=2901. The horror!

The benefits are not only clean looking urls but also urls which are easy to remember an to pass on to hot chics and family.

In this tutorial we'll be using Apache's Files / FilesMatch and ForceType directives to keep the users address bar nice and tidy. We'll be using PHP to serve up the dynamic content with the help of Pear's Numbers_Roman class to display numbers as roman numerals.