Post Title In Url Seo Friendly

Yii 1.1 General Discussion
1

Hi All,

I’m not a SEO expert, I have read that having domain.com/post/title-post-testing-1 is better than having domain.com/post/title+post+testing-1

First of all… is that true? or it really doesn’t matter?

And how to achieve that? Because I always get the title like this title+post+testing-1, I have tried several options but any of them work.

URL Manager




...

'post/<title>-<id:\d+>'=>'blog/post/view'

...

I have read this wiki used for action controllers, do I have to do something similar?

Thanks in advance!

2

\d+ is for digits only. Use somehting like [\w\-]+ instead.

3

Thanks once again ORey for your response in one of my topic.

I have tried your tip but it doesn’t work as expected:




...

'post/<title:[\w\-]+>-<id:\d+>'=>'blog/post/view',

...

I have played with it, trying other options, but I always get the title separated with + sign

Any other tip is more than welcome, where I could search to find example rules or something like this?

Thanks!

4

ok, there are two parts actually:

  1. creating the URL

  2. parsing the URL.

Second part is already covered by your url rule. Now all urls that satisfy this regexp will be passed to blog/post/view.

Now the first part. Show me how you create your urls.

5

Speaking about the plus sign, it’s the usual behaviour of url_encode() used by UrlManager.

You can override this in child classes.

Either investigate the code by yourself (it can be easily found), or wait till tomorrow, I can find this place for you.

6

I mean, if you do something like this


createUrl('/blog/post/view', array('title' => 'Nice title with spaces'))

the result will be something like

/blog/post/view/title/Nice+title+with+spaces

It can be changed by many ways, including:

  1. creating a slug for every post (kind of ID but text, ‘nice-title-with-spaces’)

  2. overriding default urlmanager

  3. …

and so on.

7

I’m not an expert also, but my SEO guys always want text instead of IDs. This freaks me out :)

8

I have a method on post model:




public function getUrl()

	{

		return Yii::app()->createUrl('blog/post/view', array(

			'id'=>$this->id,

			'title'=>$this->title,

		));

	}

So I always call to this function, the URL result looks like this right now: ‘http://domain.com/post/Testing+Post+Title-1’

9

Thanks ORey, I will try some other things, but if you find some other hint, please let me know, so much appreciate.

10

IMHO, the simplest solution is to change


'title'=>$this->title,

to something like


'title'=>some_function($this->title),

or, better, create a getter in your model, like


public function getSlug()

{

    return some_function($this->title);

}

then you will be able to use


return Yii::app()->createUrl('blog/post/view', array(

                        'id'=>$this->id,

                        'title'=>$this->slug,

                ));

some_function() should change all the spaces and other unwanted characters to ‘-’.

11

I was thinking in something similar, I have created a getter and used str_replace, works like a charm! thanks once again ORey!