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Draven, that Mambo technique is interesting, and as you point out it does not seem to be a Mambo-specific concept.
The best I can tell, they are using a PHP routine to convert all the URLs presented in templates to their new format. To the best I can determine, it also appears that they are simply passing everything in the URL to index and then letting the PHP routine in index sort it out from there.
This seems like a reasonable short-term solution, though I do wonder about the overhead of the on-the-fly-PHP-conversion vs. simply using "search engine friendly" links in the template. Since one needs to go into the template to add the "SEF call" code to each link, it seems just as easy to put the actual link there (at least for Xoops, which seems to have URLs that are more straight forward than the Mambo URLs.)
What do you think of the PHP overhead issue? I guess I lean towards saddling Apache with the mod_rewrite overhead, since it handles it very well... and leaving PHP out of it as much as possible. Particularly if we can get it to 5 or 6 mod_rewrite lines, as we have discussed in this thread. I am optimistic that can be made to work as we develop our understanding of it further.
Over the next 4 days, I hope to make another post or two to this thread with (at least) final mod_rewrite rules and (hopefully) a final set of templates.
WTravel, I'll take a stab at making a mod_rewrite rule that accomodates your comment as well. I am sure it is possible, I am just not sure it is possible by me...
Happy to see the XOOPS team and community are still excited about this and developing it to the next level.