Dynamic URL generates dynamic content

Question

I am keen to understand how I might be able to do the following.

A list of products or things that might be a JSON data object or flat text file of things.

Let's say the list of things is:

twitter
facebook
instagram

I want to get a URL system that does this:

domain.com/advice-on-twitter
domain.com/advice-on-facebook
domain.com/advice-on-instagram

where twitter or facebook is the variable and I want domain.com/advice-on-<random string> to 404.

So I am seeing how to make a slug cause a template to load according to the template but I don't want to create a whole page in the backend with a slug.

So I want to make a dynamic page creation idea. The variable will be used with php to build content that is unique and render that per page.

I don't think there is much that can be done with .htaccess for this problem.

I want to get the string from the URL in PHP and therefore build my content.

I just need to get a page-template PHP file to load where I can start my PHP work.

Hope this makes sense.

Thank you for any pointers as it is a loaded question to a degree.

Answer 1

I would actually tackle it with the .htaccess file, using RewriteCond and RewriteRule, something like:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/advice-on-(\[a-zA-z])$
RewriteRule ^/?(.*) http://domain.com/customadvice?advice=$1 [L]

Note that the Regex in the parenthesis will be reused as $1 in the RewriteRule.

You should then have a WordPress page on /customadvice and use the $_GET attribute from the page template for whatever use you need.

The path /advice-on should still give a 404.