I am very new to php (in fact about 2 days old). After getting ripped off by my last webhost I have decided to move my website to a different host. A friend has been helping me do this as he has a little info but we are now stuck and I have tried finding a soloution on google but most answers are way over my head. My site is a php site with a mysql database. We have moved the database and ftp'd the site and everything is now working on the new server except one thing - my site was designed originally to use clean urls? When I go to my shop page (ie: mywebsite.com and click on the shop link - mywebsite.com/shop/ (shows in the bottom left of my browser) I get a page not found error, yet when I type in the url mywebsite.com/shop.php the page displays fine. In addition, if I go to mywebsite.com/shop/shoes/ (another link which shows the preceding link in the bottom left hand corner) I get a page not found error. Also if I type in mywebsite.com/shop/shoes.php in the address bar I also get a page not found error even though the page shoes.php exists on the ftp server in a folder called templates - if I go to mywebsite.com/templates/shoes.php it shows up) I understand this is called clean urls and I need to add an .htaccess file to sort out the issue. I have looked on the ftp area of my old host and cannot find this file but have been told it is probably hidden. I have been told by my new provider that mod-rewrite is available on the server but I have no idea how to write this htaccess file. Can anyone please give me a step by step on how to do this as I am not a coder.
Additional Details
I have the following files in my root directory: index.php, shop.php, checkout.php, completed.php, contact.php ... I then have a folder called templates and in this folder I have: shoes.php. clothes.php, coats.php ...
The issue I am having is that most of the php files in my root directory already have href-links? pointing to places like mysite.com/shop/ and mysite.com/shop/shoes/ so when I open up the home page in my browser and hover over the links these are the addresses I see and when I click on the links I get page not found as the borwser must be looking for the links in the wrong place. (these links worked fine however on the last host I used). I understand I need an htaccess file to re-direct these links to the correct places. - ie the link for mysite.com/shop/shoes/ is actually linking to a page called shoes.php located in root/templates. I understand this method was used to tidy up the urls?? ie: instead of having mysite.com/templates/shoes.php the urls shows mysite.com/shop/shoes/. I have looked at the code within some of the php pages in the root and they all have lots of links to these 'false' addresses - ie: mysite.com/shop/shoes/ when the actual file should be at mysite.com/templates/shoes.php. I don't want to go through each file one at a time as they are hundreds of links, thus the reason for trying to make this htaccess file. Thanks for your time, Dave
You do not need mod_rewrite or .htaccess for this.
Turn on multiviews in your Apache configuration. This will allow you to omit the
.phpextension from your URLs.