I am designing a website for a client, the products of the website are coming from another company as my client is going to be drop shipping for them.

 

The company has given me .CSV and .XML version of there entire product list. However it does not have all the product information in it, mainly it does not include the description of the item.

 

I queried this with them and they said they don't include the descriptions as it would make the CSV file to large. So i went and looked at their website and they have .html extensions for their product pages, so i don't understand how they can bring in content from a database using a .html extension?

 

I want to make the URL of my clients site search engine friendly, e.g. www.website.com/title-of-the-product.html

I just need a little help in understanding the process of doing this as i am only familiar with pulling MySQL information with PHP and displaying on a .php extension page, but therefore ending up with a URL like this: www.website.com/product.php?=3435

 

I hope I've explained OK and any help would be appreciated, thanks in advanced.

 

I'm hoping to not use any shopping cart software as it will be a simple (as it can be) shopping cart system to send information to PayPal.

Copying their descriptions would be a bad idea, as that's duplicate content and theirs has been there longer and is the authoritative version. You need to hire a copywriter and come up with your own.

 

As to the URLs, you can either pattern match in a rewrite rule or rewrite all pages to index.php and use a front controller.

 

Apache can be instructed to serve any extension (.php, .phtml, .html) as PHP, all it takes is one line in .htaccess to tell it which types of file to feed through the PHP parser.

thats really helpful thanks! ill look into it