Question

I have a page where I pull a specific row from the database where the name equals what I put in the URL, but I want it SEO friendly.

So say I have “David’s Print” in the database.

I want to be able to pull it from the database by putting “davids-print” in the URL

I’m using Codeigniter as my framework.

If I need to explain better, let me know

Currently I’m using

public function item($name)
{
    $this->data['item'] = $this->db->get_where('items', array('name' => str_replace("-", " ", $name)))->result_array();
    $this->layouts->view('databases/items/single', $this->data);
}

But of course that is only for spaces

Answer 1

It’s the best to store SEO-friendly site id’s or slugs, as they are called, next to the actual title of your item. It would be hard to convert the slug back to the original title since certain characters are lost.

First add the slug field to your items table and make it unique so that there is no ambiguity (so each item has its own slug).

The slug is then generated whenever an item is inserted or updated, for example:

$this->title = $_POST['title'];
$this->slug = url_title($this->title, 'dash', TRUE);

$this->db->insert('items', $this);

If the DB throws an exception because of the “unique” constraint you can try to insert the record multiple times and just add a number to the slug.

Then you can easily search for the item using the slug ($name contains the url-part like davids-print):

$this->data['item'] = $this->db->
    get_where('items', array('slug' => $name))->result_array();

Thanks to Madmartigan for the suggestion to use url_title which comes with CI.