Comments on: Search Engine Friendly URLs in CakePHP

By: Ryan

Ryan — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 16:07:02 +0000

Hi, I’m a non-developer seeking to create SEO friendly URLs in cake that don’t display the ‘controllers.’:

The ideal end result:

domain.com/category1/
domain.com/category1/service1
domain.com/category1/service2
domain.com/category2/
domain.com/category1/service1

Etc, etc

However, it seems that we have to have something like

domain.com/article/view/category1/
domain.com/article/view/category1/service1

Etc, etc

Essentially, I dont’ want ‘article’ & ‘view.’ How could this be implemented. I’m thinking that ‘rel canonical’ will not work because the ‘home’ of the URL is unique and not duplicated. Thus I’m thinking that mod_rewrite in Apache is the only option, but have no clue how this works with CakePHP. Many, many thanks in advance for your help!

By: Philip Klauzinski

Philip Klauzinski — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 17:18:07 +0000

@Saliem: The .htaccess file is already set up to point all URLs to the CakePHP index file and route them from there. Handling the routing in the framework itself allows for cleaner and more centralized business logic, but of course everything is debatable.

By: Saliem

Saliem — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 14:17:11 +0000

Is there any reason this shouldn’t be done via the .htaccess file?

By: Jamie Nay » Useful CakePHP Tutorial Roundup for July 17, 2009

Jamie Nay » Useful CakePHP Tutorial Roundup for July 17, 2009 — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 15:12:04 +0000

[...] Search Engine Friendly URLs in CakePHP – Philip Klauzinski (February 03, 2009) The SEO experts these days claim that we should be using hyphens instead of underscores in our URLs. Easy enough on a ‘regular’ website or on a platform like WordPress (which hyphenates by defualt), but this is actually a pretty tricky process in CakePHP. While you can use something like Mariano Iglesias’ Sluggable Behavior to generate hyphenated slugs for your database items, good luck trying to replace the dashes in controller and action names! The only real solution, which, as Philip says in his tutorial, isn’t a solution at all, is to convert hyphens to underscores in your app/config/bootstrap.php or app/config/routes.php. Philip’s code for that is nice. But, this means you can’t take advantage of CakePHP’s reverse routing to generate links via the HtmlHelper and other tools. So you’re stuck writing your links manually, unless you want to hack or extend the HtmlHelper. So, the best part of this article might be the attention it draws to the issue of Cake’s support for SEO standards. Categories: Blog, Featured, cakePHP Tags: CakePHP, usability Comments (0) Trackbacks (0) Leave a comment Trackback [...]

By: hk

hk — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 11:31:27 +0000

Hey Philip, thanks for this post. I think it would be helpful for others as well if you submit it on CakePHP site as an article.