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codeigniterurl-routingseocodeigniter-2

SEO-friendly URLs in CodeIgniter without the use of slugs?

Is there a way (via routing) in CodeIgniter to change:

example.com/category/4 to example.com/category/foo-bar

where Foo Bar is the name of category 4 in the database?

Access from the SEO-friendly URL should be allowed, but access via the integer should cause a 404 error.

This should also work dynamically, where any integer is automatically converted to a URL-safe version of its corresponding category name.

I've seen a few solutions that use 'slugs'... is there a decent alternative?

Thanks.

Solution

  • I've only been working with CodeIgniter for the past couple of months in my spare time, so I'm still learning, but I'll take a shot at this (be gentle):

    There is a url_title() function in the URL Helper (which will need loaded, of course) that will change Foo Bar to foo-bar.

    $name = 'Foo Bar';
$seo_name = url_title($name, TRUE);
// Produces: foo-bar

    http://codeigniter.com/user_guide/helpers/url_helper.html

    The URL helper strips illegal characters and throws in the hyphens by default (underscores, by parameter) and the TRUE parameter will lowercase everything.

    To solve your problem, I suppose you could either do a foreach statement in your routes.php file or pass the url_title() value to the URL, rather than the ID, and modify your code to match the url_title() value with its category name in the DB.