How to show Ajax requests in URL?

This is something that eludes most new AJAXian developers. It is though a rather simple issue to solve.

first thing you will need is the the jQuery core which is free at jquery.com

next you will need the jQuery hash change even plugin by Ben Alman which you can find here: http://benalman.com/projects/jquery-hashchange-plugin/ You won't need this for newer versions of browsers that support the html5 hashchange event but you will for older versions of browsers. you don't have to do anything but include this script in your page, it handles the rest.

now for your links you will need to construct them in a query string fashion like so:

<a href="user.php?q=/topic/article" class="dynlnk">Link Text/Image</a>

now you have links that go to pages and can be handled in php in case javascript is turned off. all you have to do is use the super global $_GET and parse the query string to handle page content.

now in your javascript on the page you will need make your links trigger hashchange. You can do that by replacing the ?q= with a # like this.

$(".dynlnk").each(function(){
    $(this).attr("href", $(this).attr("href").replace("?q=", "#"));
});

now your links will trigger the hashchange, the only thing left to do is bind the hashchange to a function that does something. This can be done very simply with jQuery like this:

$(window).bind( 'hashchange', function(e){

    //this splits the part after the hash so you can handle the parts individually.
    //to handle them as one just use location.hash
    pageparts = location.hash.split("/");

});

Now just add what ever code you do to handle your ajax and content.

now you just need one last bit of javascript to trigger the hashchange in case the page was loaded with a hash to begin with