Question

Recently I’ve been doing some research into SEO and how URIs that use hyphens or underscores are treated differently, particularly by Google who view hyphens as separators.

Anyway, eager to adapt my current project to meet this criteria I found that because Kohana uses function names to define pages I was receiving the unexpected ‘-‘ warning.

I was wondering whether there was any way to enable the use of URIs in Kohana like:

http://www.mysite.com/controller/function-name

Obviously I could setup a routeHandler for this… but if I was to have user generated content, i.e. news. I’d then have to get all articles from the database, produce the URI, and then do the routing for each one.

Are there any alternative solutions?

Answer 1

Note: This is the same approach as in Laurent’s answer, just slightly more OOP-wise. Kohana allows one to very easily overload any system class, so we can use it to save us some typing and also to allow for cleaner updates in the future.

We can plug-in into the request flow in Kohana and fix the dashes in the action part of the URL. To do it we will override Request_Client_Internal system class and it’s execute_request() method. There we’ll check if request->action has dashes, and if so we’ll switch them to underscores to allow php to call our method properly.

Step 1. Open your application/bootstrap.php and add this line:

define('URL_WITH_DASHES_ONLY', TRUE);

You use this constant to quickly disable this feature on some requests, if you need underscores in the url.

Step 2. Create a new php file in: application/classes/request/client/internal.php and paste this code:

<?php defined('SYSPATH') or die('No direct script access.');

class Request_Client_Internal extends Kohana_Request_Client_Internal {

    /**
     * We override this method to allow for dashes in the action part of the url
     * (See Kohana_Request_Client_Internal::execute_request() for the details)
     *
     * @param   Request $request
     * @return  Response
     */
    public function execute_request(Request $request)
    {
        // Check the setting for dashes (the one set in bootstrap.php)
        if (defined('URL_WITH_DASHES_ONLY') and URL_WITH_DASHES_ONLY == TRUE) 
        {
            // Block URLs with underscore in the action to avoid duplicated content
            if (strpos($request->action(), '_') !== false)
            {
                throw new HTTP_Exception_404('The requested URL :uri was not found on this server.', array(':uri' => $request->uri()));
            }

            // Modify action part of the request: transform all dashes to underscores
            $request->action( strtr($request->action(), '-', '_') );
        }
        // We are done, let the parent method do the heavy lifting
        return parent::execute_request($request);
    }

} // end_class Request_Client_Internal

What this does is simply replacing all the dashes in the $request->action with underscores, thus if url was /something/foo-bar, Kohana will now happily route it to our action_foo_bar() method.

In the same time we block all the actions with underscores, to avoid the duplicated content problems.