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.
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.
Afaik the link between 4 and "foo-bar" has to be stored in the DB, so you'll have to run some queries. This is usually not done via routing in CI. Also routing just points a URL to a controller and function and has little to do with url rewriting.
Why don't you want to use slugs?
You could try storing the search engine friendly route in the database using this method or this one.
I wouldn't recommend throwing a 404. Use the canonical link tag in the instead if your worried about Google indexing both http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html.
But if you really want to I guess you could write a function that is called during the pre_controller hook http://codeigniter.com/user_guide/general/hooks.html that checks to see if the URL has an integer as the second segment then call the show_404() method. Perhaps a better solution when writing this function would be to redirect to the SEO friendly version.
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?
Yes.
Using CI 3,
http://www.codeigniter.com/user_guide/general/routing.html
Use Callbacks, PHP >= 5.3
$route['products/([a-zA-Z]+)/edit/(\d+)'] = function ($product_type, $id)
{
return 'catalog/product_edit/' . strtolower($product_type) . '/' . $id;
};
You can route to call a function to extract the name of the category.
Hope I answered your question and can help more people to like codeigniter as I believe it's speedy and light.
Slugs usage is important to make web application more secure which i think is important.
A better recommendation will be to use route to give you a better solution.
$route['(:any)/method/(:num)'] = 'Class/method';
or
$route['(:any)/method/(:num)'] = 'Class/method/$1';
$route['(:any)/gallery/(:num)'] = 'Class/gallery/$1';
base_url()/business-services/gallery/6
base_url()/travel/gallery/12
how to modify routes in codeigniter
Have fun :)
