Question About PHP and Dynamic Websites

[The Mad Plumber]

I've recently purchased a book called Learning PHP, MySQL & JavaScript. Right now, I'm building a few PHP documents for my website to replace the HTML documents I have set up currently. Understand that I'm an amateur at both HTML and PHP, and that I'm more or less rushing through the material just to get something done. When I get my PHP documents finished, that's about as elaborate as I'm going to get with my website for a while as I need to work on media to add to it as opposed to its design.

Here's my question, though. The luxury of the PHP documents is to have a dynamic website with as few documents as possible. The PHP code generates an entirely new page based on the URL inputs:

/domainname/index.php?page=helloworld

However, when I look at other professionally-designed websites, such as some of the art forums I post to or those video game news magazines, their pages seem to have URLs that suggest existing HTML documents at various locations.

/domainname/submission/0671205/

Is this something more elaborate that I might get into later in this book that I'm covering or is this an entirely different thing and I need to pick up different literature? Experienced insight is welcome. Thanks!

[Father Mannix]

That's a server configuration thing, not a PHP thing. I know, for example, that with the Apache web server it's done using mod_rewrite and the .htaccess file. It's possible that it will be covered later in your book, but it should easy enough to find out how to do so on the web, although it's not the simplest thing in the world to do.

[The Mad Plumber]

Thanks for that data. I've looked up data here and there about the .htaccess file and thus have a reference when I want to implement the system.

Okay, new question:

I am working on the new design of my website. However, here is a problem I've been recently noticing: images may or may not load. Now, the PHP code seems to be executing flawlessly, but time and again, images seem to be loading or not loading on a flippant basis. Now, the images do exist. I can look up their properties, I can go to the image directly, I can even reload the image, but whether the image loads when I open the page is trivial.

Am I getting a lousy deal from these folks that I bought web server space from? Does it have to do with the low traffic on my page? Is it something in my browser's own configuration?

[Father Mannix]

That sounds really strange. I had a similar problem once on a website I'd done, except the images would load fine, just about 25 pixels to the right of where they should be. It seemed to be a problem with the site's CSS code, but I never did anything to fix it - the problem just seemed to go away after a while.

The first thing I'd do (if you haven't done this already) is view the site in as many browsers as you can. If it only shows up in certain browsers, it's probably a CSS issue, otherwise it could be your hosting provider. Definitely a strange problem, though.