Question

I have some questions concering routing with Codeigniter. What I´m doing now is the following:

$route['articles/(:num)'] = 'articles/view/$1'; // $1 will contain an ID

This means that example.com/articles/123 will work perfectly and load an article with an ID of 123. But I also want to have the possiblilty to add the aticle´s title to the URL (for SEO). Example: example.com/articles/123/article-title

What I want is pretty much the same thing as Stack Overflow: stackoverflow.com/questions/123/the-title

How can I do that?

I´m also wondering how Stack Overflow works. If I go to stackoverflow/questions/111 the title will automatically be added to the url. Is that done with php redirect()?

Answer 1

I have done something similar in the past; I can’t find it know but IIRC (it was months ago) You can use a route like you did, and also add a more specific one, like

$route['articles/(:num)/(:any)'] = 'articles/view/$1/$2';
$route['articles/(:num)'] = 'articles/view/$1';

As you can see, both map to the same method, which is kind of “overloaded”; you can make up for a missing parameter by using a default value:

function articles($id,$slug = FALSE) 
{ }

and simply ignore the second parameter in your article retrieval.

As for adding the title you can:

1. have a “slug” field in your database, created when the article is saved. You can use the comfortable url_title($title,'dash',TRUE) function (in the url helper), which takes the $title, uses the dash as separator, and make it all lowercase;
2. use the above function and convert the title of the article (after you retrieved it from the database) “on-the-fly”; just check on the article() method if the 2nd parameter isn’t false and you’ll know if you need to create the slug or not;

As for how to show the slug even when using an url without it you can make, as you guessed, a redirect, but since both routes point to the same method it won’t change anything for you.

Oh, uhm, beware of loops while calling the redirect, check carefully 😉