SEO friendly URLs with category/subcategories/article slug? [Laravel] - laravel

Question

First of all, I have Article model and articles table in the database. Each article can be shown using Laravel's standard URI structure: www.example.com/articles/5 (where 5 the article id.). Each article has a slug field (slug column in the articles table) , so with Route Model Binding it is easy to change this and have a slug instead of id in the URI:
In RouteServiceProvider.php I just added:
public function boot(Router $router)
{
parent::boot($router);
\Route::bind('articles', function($slug) {
return \App\Article::where('slug', $slug)->firstOrFail();
});
}
... and now I can open articles with: www.example.com/articles/this-is-some-slug .
On the other hand, each article belongs to one category. For example, let's say that there are the following categories:
Politics
Sport
Football
Tennis
ATP
WTA
Culture
I created these categories by using Baum (an implementation of the Nested Set pattern for Laravel 5's Eloquent ORM). So there is a Category model and categories table in the database:
$table->increments('id');
$table->string('name');
$table->integer('parent_id')->nullable();
$table->integer('lft')->nullable();
$table->integer('rgt')->nullable();
$table->integer('depth')->nullable();
$table->timestamps();
Of course, in articles table there is a column category_id because of One-to-Many relationship (one Article belongs to one Category, one Category can have many Articles).
All articles belonging to some category can be displayed via the following URL: www.example.com/articles/category/1 (where 1 is the id). If we add slug column to the categories table & set Route Model Binding :
\Route::bind('category', function($slug) {
return \App\Category::where('slug', $slug)->firstOrFail();
});
then we will use a slug instead of id: www.example.com/articles/category/politics (this will display all the articles belonging to the category politics).
But I would like to have URIs with the following structure:
www.example.com/sport/tennis/wta/article_slug (/category/subcategory/subcategory/article_slug)
www.example.com/politics/article_slug (/category/article_slug )
and so on...
The problem is that I have no idea how to do this with Laravel. Is it even possible? How would you solve this problem?
Thanks in advance and sorry for my bad English.
SEO friendly URLs with category/subcategories/article slug?

Answer 1

To produce a url that's example.com/category/subcategory/article is pretty simple, but you're obviously looking to add the complexity of multiple subcategories. For that we'll need to look at route parameter regex constraints.
Using regex in your route parameter constraints you can get the subcategories as a string eg. subcategory1/subcategory2 and then pass it via another custom binding or directly to your controller.
Here's an example of the route you need with the route parameter constraint added:
// Route to closure
Route::get('/{category}/{subcategories}/{article}', function($category, $subcategories, $article)
{
return $subcategories;
})->where('subcategories', '(.*)');
// Route to controller method
Route::get('/{category}/{subcategories}/{article}', 'ArticlesController#show')->where('subcategories', '(.*)');
And an example of a custom binding for your subcategories parameter that returns the subcategories as an array:
$router->bind('subcategories', function ($value) {
return explode('/', $value);
});
Caveat: The only problem you will run into using the route parameter bindings in the way you've described, is that the article loaded here is only dependant on the slug being correct. It will still load if the categories in the url are unrelated, which you'll need to take care of in your controller logic.