Rewrite the url using CodeIgniter - codeigniter

Question

I read a lot of forum topics but I did not found any answer which meets my needs.
I am running a blog system and my current urls for each article look like: www.example.com/controller/method/id. However, for each article I have a title stored in a database, and would like to use that title in the url, so it would look like this: www.example.com/title

Answer 1

Hello there you are asking for a whole lot of code and you did not do any research yourself.
The best way is to use id with your title: http://www.example.com/id/long-title it is much better than using only title, because:
same title can occur more than once (creates problem that can be avoided)
slow loading/searching due querying by slug instead of ID (slow performance)
user needs to remember whole title (with id+title; user can copy partially broken url www.example.com/234593/this-title-is-) / opinion based
In order to make my proposal work you need to:
set up routes (application/config/routes.php)
//leave two CodeIgniter's routes on top
$route['default_controller'] = "welcome";
$route['404_override'] = '';
//leave this two routes in this order + make them LAST routes
$route['(:num)'] = 'blog/post/$1'; //if only id is in url
$route['(:num)/(:any)'] = 'blog/post/$1/$2'; //if id and title is in url
set up controller (application/controllers/blog.php)
<?php if ( ! defined('BASEPATH')) exit('No direct script access allowed');
class Blog extends CI_Controller {
public function __construct()
{
parent::__construct();
//load models helpers etc if not autoloaded
$this->load->helper('url');
}
public function index()
{
echo 'should throw 404 or redirect home because id was not provided';
}
public function post($id = null, $title = '')
{
if (!$this->validId( $id )) redirect(); //redirect somewhere because id of post is invalid search/404/home...
if (empty(trim($title))) {
redirect(base_url().$id.'/'.$this->getTitle($id), 'location', 301); //redirect to same page search engines friendly (301 header)
}
//display what you need
echo 'params; id: ' . $id . ' title: ' . $title;
}
private function validId($id)
{
if (is_numeric($id))
return true; //use database to check validity in this case every id is valid
}
private function getTitle()
{
//id should be good to use at this point
//get title using database
return $this->seoUrl('How you react of crying babies will determine their future.'); //made up title
}
private function seoUrl($string)
{
//source: http://stackoverflow.com/a/11330527/1564365
//Lower case everything
$string = strtolower($string);
//Make alphanumeric (removes all other characters)
$string = preg_replace("/[^a-z0-9_\s-]/", "", $string);
//Clean up multiple dashes or whitespaces
$string = preg_replace("/[\s-]+/", " ", $string);
//Convert whitespaces and underscore to dash
$string = preg_replace("/[\s_]/", "-", $string);
return $string;
}
}
/* End of file blog.php */
/* Location: ./application/controllers/blog.php */
thats it, now create yourself model that can validate ID, grab title...
sample code (of model):
public function isInDb($table, $where = array())
{
$q = $this->db->get_where($table, $where);
return ($q->num_rows() > 0) ? true : false; //returns either true or false, pretty straight forward
}
public function getColumn(){}
Now you use (generate) url www.example.com/1 (this will redirect with 301 header to /1/title) or you can use (generate) www.example.com/1/title link, however if you generate url like: /1/fake-title (title is invalid for id 1 it will not redirect to the correct one)
This solution is SEO friendly.