Slugs: Ugly Bugs, Pretty URLs

Posted by Jeremy Harris on Fri, Nov 05, 2010 @ 10:46am

I've always disliked how slugs and permalinks were created, managed and implemented. I've never thought of slugs as permalinks, and that's how I treat them. To me, a permalink is permanent and slugs are not.

The reason I dislike them is because they are usually implemented by adding a field to the database where the slug is stored. To me, this is duplicate information. I hate duplicate data. Almost as much as I hate WordPress (I'll save that for another day).

But we like slugs. They make our url's pretty and are end-users happy. No one wants to see /posts/234523. They want to see /posts/slugs-ugly-bugs-pretty-urls. Readable, consistent, relevant slugs.

Step 1: Delete that stupid extra field

Go ahead, do it. Don't worry, you can still have slugs. After all, CakePHP is about having your cake and eating it too. I created a nifty little plugin that automatically turns your messy, albeit practical, named parameters into slugs. This means things like

Router::url(
    'controller' => 'posts',
    'action' => 'view',
    'Post' => 234523
);

automatically become /posts/view/slugs-ugly-bugs-pretty-urls. Simply by adding a route. Easy, no? And the best part is that it creates the slug on-the-fly based on that specific post's $displayField. Or a different field, if you want.

The biggest change in your application will probably be changing your pass params to named params. I tend to like this method better anyway, because there's more you can do with named params. Sure, they're not as friendly, but in my experience and in many cases friendly != better.

Step 2: Connect that route

App::import('Lib', array('Slugger.routes/SluggableRoute'));

Router::connect(/posts/:action/*,
    array(),
    array(
        'routeClass' => 'SluggableRoute',
        'models' => array('Post')
    )
);

And done. Now url's that contain a Post named parameter will be turned into a slug for the user to see, then back to a named parameter for your application to handle.

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