I'm writing an app that allows you to filter database results based on Location and Category.
If someone was to search for Liverpool under the Golf category the URI would be /index.php/search/Liverpool/Golf.
Should someone want to search by Location but not category, they would be sent to /index.php/search/Liverpool
However, should someone want to filter only by category they would be unable to use /index.php/search/Golf because that would be caught by the location search.
Is there a best practice way to have /index.php/search/Golf be recognised? Some best practice as to what else to add to the URI to make these two queries distinct? /index.php/search/category/Golf perhaps?
Though that is beginning to show characteristics of /index.php?search&category=Golf which is exactly what I'm trying to avoid.
Try using $this->uri->uri_to_assoc(n)
described here http://codeigniter.com/user_guide/libraries/uri.html (half way down on page)
basically you will structure your url like this:
mysite.com/index.php/search/location/liverpool/category/golf
NOTE: the parameters are optional so you dont have to have both in there all the time. you can just as well do
mysite.com/index.php/search/location/liverpool/
and
mysite.com/index.php/search/category/golf
this way it will return FALSE if the element you are looking for does not exist
It would probably be best to keep your URI segments relavent no matter what they are searching for.
index.php/LOCATION/CATEGORY
If they are not interested in a location then pass a filler to the system:
index.php/anywhere/golf
Then in your code you just check for that specific string of ANYWHERE to determine if they only want to see the activity. I assume that you are going to be redirecting them with either links or forums (and that they aren't typing the URI string themselves) so you should be safe in just passing information that you expect and testing against that.
I use the format suggested by Tom above and then do something along the lines of below to determine the value of the parameters.
$segment_array = $this->uri->segment_array();
$is_location_searched = array_search('location', $segment_array);
if($is_location_searched && $this->uri->segment($is_location_searched +1))
{
$location = $this->uri->segment($is_sorted+1);
}
Have a look at http://lucenebook.com/#/p:solr/s:wiki and click around a bit on the left-hand navigation. Pay close attention to what happens in the url when you do. I really like this scheme for many reasons.
It's SEO-friendly.
"Curious" people can mix/match the urls and it still resolves to a proper search.
It just looks good!
Of course, the trick is really in the code, in how you build the thing. It took me a few weeks to sort it out, but I finally have my own version of that site. Just not ajax based, because I like search engines better than ajax. Ajax don't pay the bills.
Related
I'm working on redirecting people if they type a "not really wrong url".
For example I have a good URL http://www.website.com/category/foo-bar-if-bar-foo/.
This one works so if a user enter to my website with it, I can retrieve the article corresponding.
But if someone enter to my website with a not really wrong url like http://www.website.com/category/foo-bar-foo/ because an another website has referenced a wrong url, I should redirect him to the right one instead of having a 404 status code...
So how should I do this? and Most important, should I do this ?
I actually use Eloquent with Laravel 4.2.
Thank you in advance.
EDIT
I was wrong about stackoverflow, thanks for your comment. It uses the unique ID of a post.
EDIT 2
I Looked at SOUNDEX function in SQL, it's really good if there is a small difference like a character or two missing. But if my url is as broken as my example, it's not working anymore obviously. But thanks it's gonna be usefull.
Just thinking off the top of my head, you could create a SQL table (with Full-Text indexing enabled) containing all your paths (it might already exist).
In the event that a 404 is triggered, hijack that and do a MATCH (Full Text Search) and return the path with the highest scoring MATCH (you can also consider using a score threshold to prevent nonsensical matches).
Cheers everyone!
Please bear with me, I really did do some research on this, but I couldn't come to a final solution, hence I'm here to hear your opinions.
What I want to build is a small i18n-CMS with dynamic hierarchical pages such as:
domain.tld/en/I/am/a/path
I want to find the least performance intense way that allows me to have beautiful, SEO and human-friendly URLs.
I use a Closure-Table, so two tables in the database, one for the pagenodes and one for the pathtree plus another table for the localised page, that references a certain pagenode (three in total).
My different solutions so far:
Sure I could make an algorithm, that goes through all the different request segments and checks if there is an English "path" under an "a" under an "am" under an "I", but this seems very unwise considering a multitude of page-hits.
Or is it?
Positive: I wouldn't need to save the path anywhere, because it would be calculated. So moving pages around wouldn't need to recalculate the path and save it again.
I could simply save the whole path to the database, as VARCHAR(2000) or something and then just check if there is a page with path "I/am/a/path" in English language and get that one.
This seems to be rather messy.
As I do it now. Currently I add an "ID" at the end of my path. Such as:
domain.tld/en/I/am/a/path.1
So if you enter "domain.tld/en.1" you get forwarded to the one with the right slug. But here again I need to save the slug to the database, for each single page.
Also I would love to get rid of the id (could I do this with mod-rewrite and .htaccess?)
Any more insights on this one? As I'm not a webdeveloper, so I'm not really sure regarding performance.
Kindest regards,
Meren
It seems to me that page request will happen a million times more often than an editor changing a page address. So I would definitely go with the save-to-db option. What you can do is create an extra field in which you save the 'slug' for that page, in combination with .htaccess you can redirect pages from the 'slug' addresses. For example in http://www.fuuu.com/futest-fu , 'futest-fu' is a slug which could be rewritten to an ID number (or anything you would want it to be). Amongst others, Wordpress works this way. Check out this discussion for some insights: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/where-are-the-permalinks-slug-stored-in-the-database
I have a website which allows users to submit photos of wildlife. Once uploaded, they can identify the specie on the photo, for example "Polar bear".
This triggers me to get information from Wikipedia about that specie, using that search term:
$query = "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&rvprop=content&format=json&titles=" . $query;
$pages = file_get_contents($query);
Such a query returns one of the following:
An array of pageids, which I can then query for that page's content
Nothing, because there simply isn't any match
a REDIRECT result, which allows me to resolve the page with the proper name
The problem I have has to do with casing. For example, the search term "Milky stork", returns nothing, not even a redirect. "Milky Stork" does work. Uppercasing each word in the query is not a solution either, as it could be that some pages are in lowercase, whereas the uppercase query does not work. There's no consistency.
I'm looking for a way to make this more robust. It shouldn't be that a query fails because of wrong casing, which cannot even be predicted on the user's side.
Does anyone know of a solution for this? Other than trying every possible combination of casings?
Note: Some may suggest to use dbpedia instead, but this is no solution for my total needs.
Unfortunatelly, there is no easy solution - read http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Opensearch#Note_on_case_sensitivity
You can try instead use opensearch to find appropriate casing (if normal query returns nothing usable):
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=opensearch&search=milky+stork&namespace=0&suggest=
will give you
["milky stork",["Milky Stork"]]
I think trying every possible combination is a viable solution. So, your query might look like:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&rvprop=content&format=json&titles=Milky stork|Milky Stork
Note that the first letter is not case-sensitive on Wikipedia.
So, here's an example on Forrst, a CodeIgniter website:
http://forrst.com/posts/PHP_Nano_Framework_WIP_Just_throwing_some_ideas_o-mU8
Look at that nice URL. You've got the root site, then posts, then the post title and a short extract. This is pretty cool for user experience.
However, my CodeIgniter site's URLs just plain suck. E.G.
http://mysite.com/code/view/120
So it accesses the controller code, then the function view, then the 20 on the end is the Post ID (and it does the database queries based on that).
I realised I could do some routing. So in my routes.php file, I put the following in:
$route['posts/(:num)'] = "code/view/$1"; - so this will make http://mysite.com/posts/120 be the same as http://mysite.com/code/view/120. A bit nicer, I think you'll agree.
My question is - how can I use a similar technique to Forrst, whereby an extract of the post is actually appended to the URL? I can't really see how this would be possible. How can the PHP script determine what it should look up in the database, especially if there are several things with the same title?
Thanks!
Jack
To get a URL like in your example you need to add a routing rule, like you've already done $route['posts/(:num)'] = "code/view/$1";. Forrst's url seems to be "mapped" (or something like that), I think the last part of the uri is the identifier (o-mU8 seems like a hash, but I prefer an int id) which is stored in the db, so if he queries, he splits the uri by the ndashes (_), and gets the last part of it, like this within your controller action:
$elements = explode('_',$this-uri-segment(2));
$identifier = $elements[count($elements)-1];
$results = $this->myModel->myQuery($identifier);
Basically the string between the controller/ and the identifier is totally useless, but not if your goal is a better SEO.
I hope this helps
See the official dicussions. The term that is often related to this is "slug". Haven't tested the approach from the CI forums myself, but the suggestions and examples look pretty good.
The URL helper in codeigniter has a function call url_title(). I haven't used it myself but I think it's what you are looking for.
I'm developing a PHP website, and currently my links are in a facebook-ish style, like so
me.com/profile.php?id=123
I'm thinking of moving to something more friendly to crawling search engines
(like here at stackoverflow), something like:
me.com/john-adams
But how can I differentiate from two users with the same name - or more correctly, how does stackoverflow tell the difference from two questions with the same title?
I was thinking of doing something like
me.com/john-adams-123
and parsing the url.
Any other recommendations?
Stackoverflow does something similar to your me.com/john-adams-123 option, except more like me.com/123/john-adams where the john-adams part actually has no programmatic meaning. The way you're proposing is slightly better because the semantic-content-free numeric ID is farther to the right in the URL.
What I would do is store a unique slug (these SEO-friendly URL components are generally called slugs) in the user table and do the number append thing when necessary to get a unique one.
In stack overflow's case, it's
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/975240/using-seo-friendly-links
http://stackoverflow.com/questions <- Constant prefix
/975240 <- Unique question id
using-seo-friendly-links <- Any text at all, defaults to title of question.
Facebook, on the other hand, has decided to just make everyone pick a unique ID. Then they are going to use that as a profile page. Something like http://facebook.com/p/username/. They are solving the problem of uniqueness between users, by just requiring it to be some string that the user picks that is unique among all existing users.
SO 'cheats' :-).
The link for your question is "Using SEO-friendly links" but "Using SEO-friendly links" also works.
The part after the number is the SEO friendly bit, but SO doesn't really care what's there. I think it defaults to the question title.
So in your case you could construct a link like:
me.com/123/john-adams
a second john adams would have a different Id and a unique URL like :
me.com/111/john-adams
I would say that your proposed solution is a better solution to that of stackoverflows as it preserves content hierarchy:
me.com/john-adams-123
Usage of the unique ID before the username is simply nonsensical.
I would, however, recommend enforcement of content type:
me.com/john-adams-123.html
This will allow for consistent urls while serving a variety of content types.
Additionally, you could make use of sexatrigesimal for the unique id, to further reduce the amount of unnecessary cruft in your URL, especially for high end numbers, but this is often overkill :D
me.com/john-adams-123.html -> me.com/john-adams-3F.html
me.com/john-adams-1234567890.html -> me.com/john-adams-KF12OI.html
Finally, be sure to utilize 301 redirects on non-conforming accessible URIs to redirect to the "correct" seo-friendly schema to prevent duplicate content penalties.
I'd go with your style of me.com/john-adams-123, because I think the leftmost part of the URI has more importance in SEO ranking.
Actually, if you are willing to use this on several controllers (not just user profile), you may want to do it more like me.com/john-adams-profile-123 with a rewriting rule redirecting /.+-profile-(\d+) to profile.php?uid=$1 and still be able to use, say, me.com/john-adams-articles-123 for this user's articles...
To avoid dealing with the links contain special characters, you can use this plugin for Zend Framework.
https://github.com/btlagutoli/CharConvert
$filter2 = new Zag_Filter_CharConvert(array(
'onlyAlnum' => true,
'replaceWhiteSpace' => '-'
));
echo $filter2->filter('éééé ááááá ? 90 :');//eeee-aaaaa-90
this can help you deal with strings in other languages