But, you may want to consider that by exposing the very concept of “htaccess” through a tool such as Google sitemaps (or any other Google branded thing) you create extra attention towards it.

That will mean that people who would otherwise never even know such a tool existed will suddently:

(1) start asking in forums what it does,
(2) hear all kinds of half-baked success stories,
(3) start experimenting with it with no real need
(4) make lots of errors, and
(5) write a lot of posts in forums calling for help

(and possibly cursing forums, htaccess, apache, and Google all the way)

The Apache config files are very powerful tools. You can actually disable access to your whole site by accident if you mess it up – and I guess that’s where Google’s interest lies.

But, both Google and the few people that dare to answer questions on these issues would really be better off if we turned this questions upside down:

How do we make it less necessary for people to mess with these files in the first place?

These are actually issues that the fine people at Google can solve (mostly) in-house, and without even thinking about Apache. It’s about

a) handling long URLs better,
b) handling URLs with parameters better
c) handling site and page relocations better (301, 302, meta …)

If these issues were handled better and/or more consisently all we needed was communication, and less people would feel a need to mess with htaccess files. I would gladly help in the communication effort as that would mean answering the same questions over-and-over-again less times.

Any ideas would be greatly welcome.

erkan, i got loads of free time and i would love to help you anywhere i can.

The idea is really great!

Most people will(or would like to) configure apache remotely, so any local app will be only a half-solution or even 1/8 solution.
I’d suggest developing mod for apache that will provide simple web interface. Like if you go to http://www.yoursite.com/yourfolder/.htaccess and get it right there.

Of course it’s going to be a serious challenge to compete with a simplicity of plain text files.

Looking to participate in SoC 2006
Andrew

we have currently developing a configuration tool for apache. We have a meeting soon with the author of mod_rewrite and mod_ssl to see if he is interested in getting involved. Our challenge is to get a full functional but easy UI which is not easy at all.

erkan

Obviously, the first thing that needs to be done is to identify maybe the top 10 or 20 of these tricky, yet common tasks that people are having trouble with. I know that using mod_rewrite, for instance, is constantly coming up on webmaster forums, despite the fact that many people are trying to do the exact same thing. One example is trying to make dynamic applications look static so that they’ll be crawled. Most of the tasks that come to my mind — password protecting a directory is another example — seem pretty simple to handle.

For the writing of configuration files, the application is pretty useless unless it can be accessed remotely. One could start out by writing a local application in Java/C/C++ and then, to provide a nice user experience, you could implement front-ends in a whole slew of webapp technologies — PHP comes to mind, but JSP or Perl or anything similar would work, too. The whole thing could be done in using one of these webapp platforms, but that presupposes that the user has already configured one of them correctly and that seems a bit circular to me Also, having a command-line tool would give developers to write nice GUIs for their favorite OS to serve users running Apache locally.

If something like this were implemented, it would make life a lot easier for professional and amateur webmasters alike, and, in doing so, would be a great way to promote adopting Apache.

Dan

I taught myself (as did most people who are reading this, me thinks) how to use the wonders of htaccess and config files. It was a bit painful but doable.

Where a htaccess tool would be great is as part of a shared hosting package on the different hosting providers. It could be set up to give some access to the power of this without completely opening up the guts of the server to someone who may or may not have the wheels to work it safely.