I would suggest that you look at php as the total solution not mod_rewrite that way you have access to include the PHPSESS information into the URL directly eg:
http://www.yourhost.com/application/first_name/john/sess_id/99f9f99f9f9f 9ijfjf9f/cart_full/yes You can achieve this by reading the following artcile... we use it for websites that will be searchable by bots with great success. http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/tim19990117.php3 Oh and on the bot side of things... simply have an expiry (epoch stamp) in the url that you read and if that has expired simply reload the page with a new session... oh and you will experience the same problem with bookmarking visitors as well as bots with the expired sessions.. or you could just simply say if it doesn't exist recreate... it depends if you are going to use built in session handlers or user (eg database) or even custom self written (my suggestion for your situation - write your own env). If you need further assistance don't hesitate to ask. Timothy Hitchens (HITCHO) [EMAIL PROTECTED] HITCHO has Spoken! -----Original Message----- From: Tech Support [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, 10 October 2002 4:33 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PHP] Spiders, Sessions, trans SID, and mod_rewrite Hello I'm preparing to start an ecommerce project that will require the use of sessions throughout the entire site for referrer and affiliate tracking purposes. I also plan to use mod_rewrite to make links to dynamic content search spider friendly. example: instead of /somescript.php?var1=value1&var2=value2 I'll have /somescript/var1/value1/var2/value2 The obstacle I'm facing is the automatic appending of the session id to every link upon first entering the site and to every link on every page of the site if session cookies are disabled. This will make search spiders either not index the linked pages, or worse index them with an old session id! I am hoping to find two solutions to dealing with this inherent problem with sessions, spiders, trans sid, and url rewriting. 1) I am thinking of obtaining and using a list of known spiders to determine if the visitor is a spider. If they are a spider I simply won't call session_start() thus eliminating the auto appending of the session id to every link. URL rewriting will take care of the ugly query strings and I'm in business to get spidered. How ever, this could mean a lot of overhead if the site gets busy and a lot of work keeping an updated spider list. Does anyone have a solution for this? I want some real world experience here please. 2) If I rewrite query strings how will I deal with trans sid? For instance, I have a rewritten url that looks like this: /somescript/var1/value1/var2/value2 and the session id is going to get appended leaving me with this: /somescript/var1/value1/var2/value2&PHPSESSID=some_session_id. Is there a way to make php add the session id in the slash delimited format? I am aware of arg_separator.output directive but that does not fix the = in the query string. I appreciate any help, tips, and/or pointers. The problem is clear - it's the solution that's a little fuzzy! Thanks for reading, Jim -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
