I want to rewrite some url's using mod_rewrite. All of the posts in my cms have a unique id so to use a url like http://www.mysite.com/article/1 would be easy enough, however I would rather do it like http://www.mysite.com/article/article_title if I can.

Is this possible? how would I do it?

It would be possible but each article title would need to be unique. A good alternative is to do it like:

http://www.mysite.com/article/1/article_title

This way also means you don't have to store the SEF URI or create a set of functions for handling them.

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So with this method the 'article_title' on the end isn't really needed as the actual location of the article is given by the id, the 'article_title' part is just for better seo, is that right?

yep, correct.

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Gotya lol, I'll give it a shot.

Thanks.

Can anyone see where I'm going wrong with this?

It should be redirecting from www.mysite.com/view.php?action=view&id=14 to www.mysite.com/articles/14/article_name but I just get a 404 error.

RewriteRule ^articles/(.*)/(.*) /view.php?action=view&id=$1&article=$2

Problem is highlighted

There's still a problem with that Regex string, the first grouping (first set of parentheses) will match everything:

www.mysite.com/articles/14/article_name would lead to:
$_GET['id'] = "14/article_name"

It's just simple regular expressions and a more appropriate one would be somewhere along the lines of:
If you need things explaining, just ask. :)

or depending on your config you can make it non-greedy like so:

RewriteRule ^articles/(.*?)/(.*?) /view.php?action=view&id=$1&article=$2

But i would suggest using salathe's for some reason i figured you were using non-greedy parentheses

If you dont mind showing me what each part does that would be great so I know what I'm doing lol :)

Where should I be placing this .htaccess file? Normally I would put it in the htdocs folder but because I'm creating a simple cms in a folder called 'cms' I thought I would be better off putting it in that folder, but it doesn't seem to work :S

You need to use a rewrite base if you are going to put it in a sub-folder like so:

If you do not want to place this in a sub-folder and want to have it in the root folder you need to add prefixes to the urls like so:

Thats great, thanks :D