Make title string the entire URI for all pages using CodeIgniter - php

With CodeIgniter I'm trying to create a URL structure that uses a title string as the entire URI; so for example: www.example.com/this-is-a-title-string
I'm pretty confident I need to use the url_title() function in the URL Helper along with the routes.php config folder but I'm stuck bringing it all together.
Where do I define the URI and how is it caught by the routes folder?
Seems to be a straight forward problem but I'm getting stuck creating the URLs end-to-end. What am I missing?
I thought about a catch-all in the routes folder: $route['(.*)'] = "welcome/controller/$1"; ....but how would this work with multiple functions inside a particular controller? ...and maybe it's not even the right way to solve.

You can send all requests to a driver with something like this:
$route['(:any)'] = "welcome/function";
Then use the _remap function to route requests inside the controller.
However, using URL's as you suggest limits the CI functionality. Try something better like www.example.com/article/this-is-a-title-string
$route['article/(:any)'] = "articles/index";
and in article (controller), use _remap...

If you're going to re-route every request, you should extend CI_Router.
The actual implementation depends on what you're doing. If you customize CI_Router, you can do it AFTER the code that checks routes.php, so that you can keep routes.php available for future customization.
If the URI contains the controller, function, and parameters, you can parse it within your extended CI_Router and then continue with the request like normal.
If the URI is arbitrary, then you'll need something (file, db, etc) that maps the URI to the correct controller/function/parameters. Using blog posts as an example, you can search for the URI (aka post-slug in WordPress) in the db and grab the corresponding record. Then forward the request to something like "articles/view/ID".

Related

Routing in CodeIgniter for (:any)

I'm trying to make my CodeIgniter application work similarly to WordPress.
I want to be able to make these kind of URLs:
http://www.example.com/my-post-example
http://www.example.com/new-headline-here
http://www.example.com/i-love-stackoverflow
My routing:
$route['(:any)'] = "core/index/$1";
Which will call my Core controller and pass the page name into the index function.
I then lookup in my database for the page name and display the page to the user. So far so good.
However, there will be times when I want to call another controller. For example:
http://www.example.com/admin/edit_page/3
http://www.example.com/admin/settings
Now I assume my route will just grab all these rules and send them into my Core controller. Is there a way to make an exception for certain pages? Or is it a good idea to do this check inside my Core controller.
For example,
if ($page not in DB) {
// Call controller/method
}
This seems a little redundant since I just want CodeIgniter to handle this.
The routing rule you using it is OK for your purpose.
If you use http://www.example.com/admin/edit_page/3 this link it will send you admin controller and edit_page method.It will not use routes any rule.
However you will get one problem if your link looks like this
http://www.example.com/my-post-example/test
It will try to go my-post-example controller and test method.
Again http://www.example.com/admin will use routes any rule, means it will redirect your to core controller instead of admin/index. In that case your url should be http://www.example.com/admin/index
Finally If you call your other link with controller/method name it will be OK using your any rule

create a dynamic url in codeigniter like facebook

I need to create a dynamic url in codeigniter like the facebook application. Is it possible to create such url using the codeigniter framework?
eg:
1. www.facebook.com/nisha
2. www.facebook.com/dev
You need to set up custom routing for the controller in application/config/routes.php. Like:
$route['([a-zA-Z]+)'] = "controller_name/function/$1";
This makes urls like the way you want, but it makes all of your controller inaccessible, that is because any '/controllername/parameter/' format will match with '(:any)' and will be redirected to our 'controller_name/function/'.
To stop controllers redirected by the CI router, you will have to explicitly define all of your controllers on the routes.php first then add the above mentioned routing rule at last line. Thats how i made it to work.
Hope that helps you in some way.
Its pretty easy to setup this by the use of routes. Read their routing guide
$route['([a-zA-Z]+)'] = "controller/user/$1";
However, if their is only one way of accessing the website, is like domain.com/username then its ok, otherwise, this will prove be a hard catch on the long run. On that case, limit the Route to a limited scope like
$route['users/([a-zA-Z]+)'] = "controller/user/$1";
This will help in the extending the system in numerous way
Try this way. it will reduce a lot of repetitive line if you have lots of controller but i don't know does it violate any CI rules.
//this code block should be placed after any kind of reserved routes config
$url_parts = explode('/',strtolower( $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']) );
$reserved_routes = array("controller_1", "controller_2", "controller_3" );
if (!in_array($url_parts[1], $reserved_routes)) {
$route['([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)'] = "controller_1/profile/$1";
}

Route random strings to a specific controller in CodeIgniter?

I am trying to create short links to my application in codeigniter but I've met a kind of a problem when designing my route. The problem is that I want a route which will take a string containing a-Z and numbers and redirect that to a controller called image with the string after. Like this: app.com/randomstring -> app.com/image/randomstring. But when I am trying to do this in the routes config file with a regular expression it disables my application and I am unable to enter "normal" urls with controllers that already exist.
How my route looks like right now (I know it's probably very wrongly made):
$route['(^[A-Za-z0-9]+$)'] = "image/$1";
Is there any easy way to redirect with that short url without using another fake controller first like this: app.com/i/randomstring -> app.com/image/randomstring
And could you maybe help me improve and tell me what part of my regexp is failing?
As I mentioned in the comments, without a clearly defined spec on what the image urls will be, there's no comprehensive way to solve this. Even YouTube (related to the library you linked to) uses urls like /watch?v=h8skj3, where "watch" is the trigger.
Using a i/r4nd0m$tring would make this a non-issue, and it's what I suggest, but I had another idea:
$route['(:any)'] = "image/$1";
// Re-Route all valid controllers
foreach (array('users', 'login', 'blog', 'signup') as $controller)
{
$route[$controller] = $controller;
$route[$controller.'/(:any)'] = $controller.'/$1';
}
unset($controller);
You might need the image route last, I'm not 100% sure. This should route everything to image/ except the controllers you define. You could even use glob() or something to scan your controller directory for PHP files to populate the array.
Another way to get one character shorter than i/string could be to use a character trigger, like example.com/*randomstring, but that's a little silly, i/ is much cleaner and obviously, easier to deploy.

How to implement keyword specific page invocation using PHP codeigniter

How to implement keyword specific page invocation using PHP codeigniter
Binary search Tree Implementation.
for e.g. in above URL keyword "binary-search-tree-implementaion" is method name or parameter for specific controller. because most of things are dynamic then how web site is going to manage all those things?
I want to implement it for my web site like this
http://example.com/search/digital-camera-price-in-india
I'm not familiar with CodeIgniter, but usually a URI structure like /search/digital-camera-price-in-india would route to the Search controller and digitalCameraPriceInIndia action.
/search/digital-camera-price-in-india
=> SearchController::digitalCameraPriceInIndiaAction()
If you want to route similar URIs (different products for example) to a catch-all method, you've have to setup custom routing.
The CodeIgniter documentation for routing is here
As per #chriso's answer you will need to set up a custom route to achieve this as by default the uri structure is /controller/action/params. So in your config/routes.php file you can add something like:
$route['search/(:any)'] =
"search/some_action";
And then use the relevant uri segment (
$this->uri->segment[1]
I think) as your search parameter.
if you set up your route like this:
$route['^search/(:any)'] = "search/my_controller_function/$1";
Then you can just write your function like this:
public function my_controller_function($search_input)
{
// your code here
}

MVC - No Controller in the URI?

Let's pretend I'm trying to learn CI, and as my test project I am building a group-buying site.
What I'd like is to have a different page for each city, e.g.:
http://www.groupon.com/las-vegas/
http://www.groupon.com/orlando/
I'd also like to have different pages such as:
http://www.groupon.com/learn
http://www.groupon.com/contact-us
If I am building this in CI and following the MVC ideology, how would this work? I'm having difficulty seeing how to accomplish the desired URL's with the concept of:
http://www.domain.com/controller/view/segment_a/segment_b/etc...
What I would do is create a custom 404 controller that acts as a catch-all for non-existent routes.
It would take the URI, possibly validate it, and re-route it to the (e.g.) "city" controller.
If the city controller can't find the city (whatever string was specified), then it needs to issue a proper 404. Otherwise, you're good to display your information for that city.
Also, once you create your custom 404 controller, you can send all 404 errors to it by specifying a route named '404_override'.
That's where URI Routing comes in. But in your case you'll probably will have to be carefull defining your routes as the first and only part of your route is a variable part already.
This really has nothing to do with MVC, and much more to do with good URL.
You're looking for URLs that are both (a) clear from the user's point of view and (b) that give hints to your application as to how it's meant to be handled.
What I'd do in this case is redesign your URLs slightly so that rather than:
http://www.groupon.com/las-vegas/
http://www.groupon.com/orlando/
You would have URLs that looks like this:
http://www.groupon.com/destinations/las-vegas/
http://www.groupon.com/destinations/orlando/
The bit at the beginning--/destinations/--can be used by your URL routing code to decide what controller should be dealing with it. If your routing code is URL-based, you might have an array like this:
$routes = array(
'/destinations/' => 'on_destination_list',
'/destinations/(.+)' => 'on_destination',
'/(.*)' => 'on_page');
// Basic URI routing code based off of REQUEST_URI
foreach ($pattern => $func) {
if (preg_match("`^$pattern$`", $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], $placeholders)) {
array_shift($placeholders);
call_user_func($func, $placeholders);
}
}
Keep in mind that I wrote that routing code off the top of my head and it may not be absolutely correct. It should give you the gist of what you need to do.
Doing things this way has the added benefit that if somebody goes to http://www.groupon.com/destinations/, you'll have the opportunity to show a list of destinations.

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