So, I am having a big time problem.
I am using CodeIgniter. I have a website running that has a lot of pages, so URLs get too big and they look too bad. So what I want to do, is shorten my URLs. For example:
www.abc.com/main/home/promotion/deals
I want to make something like this:
www.abc.com/deals
So my question is, How should I do this thing in CodeIgniter? Is there a built in helper or library for handling my problem?
You should definitely check out the URI Routing.
In your case:
$route['deals'] = "main/home/promotion/deals";
Here is a good article if you want to actually change the URL length with a more automatic way:
http://www.web-and-development.com/codeigniter-minimize-url-and-remove-index-php/#removing-first-url-segment
I think there are lot of examples of the usage, so it is also like a small tutorial of how to use the routes of Codeigniter.
This is very useful especially if you are using dynamic content and the urls are automatically created (e.g. for SEO content and URLs created by your customer).
Related
I've tried to search for the best way to handle links on a dynamic website when using "Clean" or "Pretty" URLs, but have not been able to find anything.
I've found a LOT of information on how to use mod_rewrite and try_files, which I've implemented successfully, now my php front controller parses all the parameters on a URL, and it links to the page correctly. No problem here.
The issue I'm having is how to best build all the links on my pages. Currently my links are all in the format eg. "www.site.com?do=post&id=23" which works fine. However I'd like them to display as "www.site.com/post/23" which already also works fine, because of try_files, and how my front controller parses all the parameters from the URL.
However do I now go through all my code and change all the dynamically built links to build in the "www.site.com/post/23" format? It seems like a lot of work, and to be honest I'd like to leave it an "option" to either use Clean or Dirty URLs, similar to how Wordpress allows it as an option in their Admin panel.
Do sites like that keep links in the format "www.site.com?do=post&id=23" and use a rewrite function on all the links when the page is created? So the links show up as Clean when the user sees it?
I'm confused as the best way to handle this, and hope I explained what I'm looking for. I just want to know how best to handle the dynamic links and have it optional to display as clean or dirty url format, for lack of a better word.
Thanks for any help.
That's a very conceitual question...
You could see how Laravel framework router works.
You do not need to use it, but you can get ideas there.
The router class is responsible of know how to create a url to some resource, page, action, whatever you want.
So in your view you just call a method that return the url.
I'm creating my own CMS from scratch as a way to build my php and mysql skills. Everything is going well, but I'm at the point where I want to create individual post pages for each blog post I write. So the index.php page has a list of all my blogs with snippets of each post and there is a read more button that should take the user to the full page for each blog post. Each post has a url created from the blog title entered in the "create post" form. I'm trying to figure out how to create unique pages for each post without passing the title, subhead, post content and other info through the GET.
This also dovetails with another feature I'm trying to add. I want to be able to create individual pages using a "create page" form like I did for my posts. So if I want an "about us" page I go to my admin form, fill out the title, add the content, and when I hit submit it creates the page dynamically. I have thought all day about how I'd do these two things but can't quite figure out how I can do this.
FYI, I'm not asking for code, I just need a push in the right direction as I try to conceptualize how to achieve this. Thanks!
If you're not familiar with the Model-View-Controller pattern, reading up on it might be prudent. MVC is frequently the right starting place for high-level design of web applications.
Also, a CMS is a big enough project you should consider using a PHP framework like CodeIgniter, Symfony, Zend, etc. to make your life easier. It removes a lot of the drudge work and common tasks.
Dynamic Page Creation and Display
I think you want to split it into two things: the text content (basically what you put in the forms) and the HTML templating surrounding that content.
When you make a page or blog post, you would want to store the actual content (what you type into the creation form) in a database of some sort (not necessarily an RDBMS, but if you're trying to build MySQL skills it's a reasonable choice).
Then you would use a separate function to bind that content into an HTML template and present it to the user when they load a given page.
URL Routing
To get nicer-looking URLs you can use something like apache's mod_rewrite. You can use that to convert a URL like this:
posts/how-to-make-a-cms
to this:
posts.php?title=how-to-make-a-cms
Then you can have posts.php read from GET as normal. How you choose to do the conversion is pretty open-ended.
To avoid getting really complicated rewrites, people often just structure everything to go to a central routing script which figures out what class and method to call and what arguments to pass it. So it would rewrite the URL above to:
main.php?a=posts/how-to-make-a-cms
Then main.php would parse out the segments of that argument from GET and figure out where to send them. Like it might take posts/show/how-to-make-a-cms and do something like:
$o = new Posts();
$o->show("how-to-make-a-cms");
If you do it that way, I think you can avoid mod_rewrite entirely as long as you're willing to accept only slightly pretty URLs, like this:
mysite.com/main.php?/posts/show/how-to-make-a-cms
I haven't done this type of thing before (because the frameworks do it so beautifully already), so I might be missing some minor details.
You should watch some tutorials from phpacademy.org or thenewboston.org, they have best and most valuable tutorials ever made about PHP.
I think you may try to start from that course/playlist:
phpacademy.org: PHP Tutorials: Creating a Blog
If you don't understand everything, watch this:
thenewboston.org: Official Beginner PHP Tutorials Playlist!
If you have no problems with PHP itself you may try to use some simple framework with MVC support. That helps A LOT in variable handling between pages, makes work with database easier etc.
phpacademy.org: Introduction to CodeIgniter
phpacademy.org: Introduction to CodeIgniter - Basic Website
I had the same problem. You can easily do this by using the fopen function. Here is a link to a tutorial: http://www.tizag.com/phpT/filecreate.php
<?php
function wwwcopy($link,$file)
{
$fp = #fopen($link,"r");
while(!feof($fp))
{
$cont.= fread($fp,1024);
}
fclose($fp);
$fp2 = #fopen($file,"w");
fwrite($fp2,$cont);
fclose($fp2);
}
//Example on using this function
wwwcopy("http://www.domain.com/list.php?member=sample", "sample.html");
//Another example
wwwcopy("http://www.domain.com/list.php?member=sample2", "sample2.html");
?>
Is there any method in Php by which I can create a page automatically based on a predefined template. Like if we create a new post in blogger it automatically creates page for that post with the name of that post, like this one:
http://learntoflash.blogspot.com/2009/12/exit-button-in-flash.html
Here Exit Button In Flash is the name of my post I have written and an automatic page is created for it.
Or like here on this website if we ask a question it automatically creates a page for that question. I want to know can I achieve this in Php or anything close to this ?
...here on this website if we ask a question it automatically creates a page for that question.
It sounds like you may believe an actual file is created when you post a question. My bet would be that this page is generated via the question id in the URL.
The only files created would be cached output, which may or may not resemble actual HTML pages.
You should use URL rewriting. This Apache module lets you define rules to rewrite web addresses in your desired way.
The process to make your web application ready for this, is not a short story so you should read more about it.
This article is a good starting point:
http://articles.sitepoint.com/article/guide-url-rewriting
This is acheived by using mod_rewrite. A good place to look for inspiration is the .htaccess used in Wordpress.
to something like that you have to grasp the very fundamental in php or any programming language at all, i mean the core of php is to create dynamical generated pages based on user/browser input.
You might need to take a quick tutorial about php might I suggest http://www.tizag.com/phpT/
good step for step tutorial
Edit:
if you're wondering how the websites seems to have created a html page for every question, the answer would be they're not they are probably using mod_rewrite as mentioned before to rewrite to url to print a little more user friendly url, the actual url could be something like this https://stackoverflow.com/index.php?post=4499289 in reality
What method can you recommended for creating search engine-friendly URLs? When coding in PHP that is. Ideally I would like something like:
http://www.example.com/article/523544
So it doesn't display the file it's opening (eg article.php)
It is quite necessary to generate a SEO friendly URL's so that most of the Search engines can easily index it.And the most interesting part with it that URL can easily correlate to the Page Content and the User can generate a Pretty URL as per the keywords he want to rank the page on different Search Engines(e.g. google.com,google.co.in,bing.com)
The best example to have Pretty Links is on Wordpress.It actually stores the Dynamic Page URL's in the Database itself.And when the Pretty Ur is being called,internally the htaccess is called and it redirects to the original dynamic page in the system.
Some basic tips from
Google
SEOmoz
may help you.
Some topics in SO:
mod_rewrite
nice url
Edit:
You need to place a .htaccess file in your document root that includes the following rules:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^article/([0-9]+)?$ article.php?id=$1 [L]
Make sure mod_rewrite enabled in Apache and you are allowed to use it.
If you read some questions in SO in this topic it will help you understand how mod_rewrite works.
To make your urls more search engine friendly you may want to use 'slugs' so you need to sanitize your article titles like in this url.
Ideally your URL needs to contain something about the topic of the URL. You gave the example of http://www.example.com/article/523544, where this is better than using standard query strings, it's still not ideal, as all that any search engine can see from it is that it's an article.
It's important to remember that the segment (a segment is the string between each slash) closest to the domain is the most important:
http://www.example.com/most-important/next-important/less-important/
I personally always try to use the following URL structure, and keep my page/article titles unique:
http://www.example.com/this-wonderful-article
Notice the use of dashes and not underscores, this is generally known as the preferred method. Using this method I usually generate and save the article's slug ('this-wonderful-article') in the database, and then search for that instead of an ID.
Appreciated that sometimes it's very difficult to just use slug, especially with a larger website. You may have multiple articles with the same title, or the website may have user-submitted content over which you have no control. If this is the case, you can use the ID without any worries, but just be sure to include the title of the article in the URL. Eg: http://www.example.com/this-wonderful-article/29587
If you're looking for a method of using these URLs then I'd suggest looking at some mod_rewrite tutorials. Personally I use a framework that does the majority of the legwork for me such as CodeIgniter (http://www.codeigniter.com), or you could use something like the Zend Framework or CakePHP. If you're only doing articles then it might be worth looking into a sturdy CMS like WordPress, although this depends largely on your requirements.
I'm trying to make a clean url for a blog on a dynamic website, but I think that the problem is that I don't know how to plan the website schema.
I read about how to use mod_rewrite and all I found is how to make "http://www.website.com/?category&date&post-title" to "http://www.website.com/category/date/post-title". that's works o.k for me.
The problem is that If my url looks like "http://www.website.com/blog/?id=34" this method won't work as far as I got it.
So, I have two questions:
1. Is there a way to use mod_rewrite (maybe read from a txt file) to read the post title of my blog and rewrite my url by date and post-title?
2. Should I rewrite my website to query the data from one index file in the homepage and use mod_rewrite to write the nice url? should I query also the date and the title of the post instead just the post ID?
mod_rewrite used to rewrite requests and it has nothing to do with urls. You have to change urls by hands.
yes, it's most common practice, to query the data from one index file
no, you can't use mod_rewrite to write the nice url
yes, an id must be present in the url along with title. your engine will just throw title away and use only id to retrieve an article.
Take a look at SO urls for an example
What you're talking about is commonly referred to as routing and lots of examples exist of different ways to do it with PHP. The most common approach uses the frontcontroller pattern, which means in the simple case rewriting all URLs to a single php file and then having that file determine what content to show dynamically based on the URL.
The most popular PHP frameworks (CakePHP, Symphony, Codeigniter, etc.) all have routing code in them which you might be able to use or might serve as inspiration. Alternatively this article covers lots of the basics if you want to do it yourself: http://www.phpaddiction.com/tags/axial/url-routing-with-php-part-one/
RewriteMap allows you to do all sorts of dynamic rewriting (text file, script, etc).