Redirecting a working dynamic URI to a new static format

[vividwebdesign]

Hi all

I am having some issues rearding url rewrites and 301 redirects with 1 and 1 hosting and am unsure of the best approach. The website is a custom made shopping cart system with categories and products.

The current urls for categories are : index.php?l=product_list&c=1      The new url format required is : /banner-stands

After a little bit of research I added the following into the htaccess file;

Options +FollowSymlinks
AddType x-mapp-php5 .php

RewriteEngine On

RewriteBase /

RewriteRule ^banner-stands/?$ index.php?l=product_list&c=1 [R=301,NC,L]

Which works but I have a few questions

Question 1: Is this the best approach as there are 55 categories and 179 products to write redirects for

Question 2: Or is it better to firstly add id=banner-stands into the url and then create 301 redirects to the new url and then rewrite the url.

Thanks

[FedeEinhorn]

This is what I would do:

.htaccess

Options +FollowSymLinks -Multiviews -Indexes
RewriteEngine On

#This line is for the categories
RewriteRule ^category/(.*)$ index.php?l=product_list&category_name=$1 [L]

Note: you will need a new rule for each "type" of page. That was an example for the categories only.

Then you will need to add some PHP code to read the $_GET["category_name"] variable, which should be text (like banner-stands) and get the category id from your database to later load the products. You have several ways to do that, for example: insert an extra column in the DB with the category name "dashed" and search the category id using that new field.

You should then change your internal linking to use those new URLs instead and add a rel=canonical pointing to the new versions of the URLs.

Don't 301 all others until you have the above solved and working. Make sure you make everything safe, as with that structure something like  index.php?l=product_list&c=1&sort=asc won't work anymore unless you create extra rules for that, same as with pagination, if you have any.

Hopes this gives you an idea on where to start.

***You are not redirecting dynamic to static urls, you are just making them friendlier