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

Question

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.

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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?

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

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 :)