Question

My question is simple, how do I achieve SEO optimizing tasks with symfony 1.4?

The first problem, which isn’t only a SEO problem but rather a symfony 1.4 in general is that symfony does a strange thing with URLs like:

module/action

AND

module/action/

The first one works, the second one is rejected or throws an error, OR what is most common works, but does not redirect (with a 301) to the first one, which should be a convention, since SEO-wise those urls are not identical.
This shouldn’t be.

Answer 1

This a common error in symfony, this trailing slash can cause trouble. Some will tell you that this is normal because the first one is a file and the second one is a directory. Since you can’t browse directory with symfony, it throw an error.

But you have two options as a work around, use htaccess or use a custom routing.

htaccess: (from here)

RewriteRule ^(.+)/$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

custom routing: (from here)

/apps/frontend/config/factories.yml

all:
  routing:
    # class: sfPatternRouting
    class: myPatternRouting

Create the class:

apps/frontend/lib/myPatternRouting.class.php

<?php
class myPatternRouting extends sfPatternRouting
{
  protected function normalizeUrl($url)
  {
    $url = parent::normalizeUrl($url);

    // remove trailing slash
    $url = preg_replace('/\/$/', '', $url);

    return $url;
  }
}