Make pretty URLs with PHP URL Routing

For the past couple of days, I wonder on how to make my URLs pretty for SEO purposes and make a clean approach to my web applications. We are currently studying MVC for ASP.Net in our computer elective IV and one of the topic is about URL Routing. Since I’m a PHP developer, I made some research on how to implement URL Routing with PHP.  It is very easy to implement and to understand. Here is a quick example.

Required Files:
.htaccess
index.php

.htaccess:

Options +FollowSymLinks
IndexIgnore */*
# Turn on the RewriteEngine
RewriteEngine On
#  Rules
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . index.php

For example: http://www.example.com/post/12
To get the values from your url in your index.php file:

$uri = explode('/', $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);
echo $uri[1]." ".$uri[2]; //Outputs post 12

Furthermore using switch:

$uri = explode('/', $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);
switch($uri[1]){
	case "post":{
		$postId = $uri[2];
		require_once("post.php");
		break;
	}
	default:{
		require_once("default.php");
		break;
	}
}

The above example will now direct you to a post with a postId of 12. This is a quick example of PHP URL routing for you. For further discussion visit my resource for this post.