Question

All,

I am currently using CakePHP to completely revamp my current NEWS site. I have or will transfer all current articles to my new site and they will take on the same article_id as the current site. However, I have realized of the following problem.

My current site uses the following setup as URL:

http://www.mydomain.com/?c=140&a=4388

c=references the category ID and a=references the article ID. My new setup (CakePHP) I take advantage of slugs and now my articles URLs display as:

http://www.mydomain.com/noticia/this-is-an-article-slug

Since, I have noticed, thru webstats, that many of my articles are accessed thru links setup on other sites like Facebook, I thought it would be crucial to create a system/route that will take care of this issue for me.

This is what I am thinking:

1. Create a route that detects requests similar to what is mentioned above
2. Make the route pass the a value as parameter to a redirect function in my articles controller, such as articleRedirect($article_id)

3. This function would then look up in the database for slug based on the passed $article_id and redirect to the new address (See function below)

   // Function in articles controller to redirect old site's article url to 
   // new websites url format
   
   function articleRedirect($article_id = NULL){
       $this->Article->recursive = -1;
       $slug = $this->Article->findById($article_id);        
       if($slug == NULL){
           $this->Session->setFlash('Article not found');
           $this->redirect('/noticias');
       }else{
           $this->redirect('/noticia/'.$slug['Article']['slug']);
       }
   }
   

I think that should work. However, I need some serious help with routing. Can anyone suggest a route I can use.

Thank you very much.

Answer 1

Thanks for Oldskool for the willingness to help. However, I had trouble implementing it. I decided to stay away from using .htaccess or routes and opted to implement a function in app_controller that will handle it for me as such:

In my app_controller's beforeFilter() I added the following:

//Check old url style as in http://www.bravanews.com/?c=123&a=2345 for redirection
    //to the correct new url style as in http://www.bravanews.com/noticia/news-title-using-slug
    $this->CheckOldUrl();

Then in my app_controller.php I created the following function:

function CheckOldUrl(){
    preg_match("/\?c=(\w+)\&a=(\w+)/i", $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], $matches);
    if(!$matches == NULL){
        $this->redirect('/noticias/articleRedirect/'.$matches[2]);
    }
}

If old url the above function will transfer to the articleRedirect function which will then redirect to the right document

// Function in articles controller to redirect old site's article url to 
// new websites url format

function articleRedirect($article_id = NULL){
    $this->Article->recursive = -1;
    $slug = $this->Article->findById($article_id);        
    if($slug == NULL){
        $this->Session->setFlash('Article not found');
        $this->redirect('/noticias');
    }else{
        $this->redirect('/noticia/'.$slug['Article']['slug']);
    }
}

It is probably not the best way to handle this kind of things this way since it makes a call to that function everytime time my site is accessed, but it is working for me without major problems.