how to make url slug like Quora does using yi framework ?

Question

Using Quora has made me wonder how they do their slug like thes : quora.com/topics-slugs , quora.com/questions-slug or quora.com/usernames-slug.

Actually i am developing an application with yii framework and i want to have a slugs like quora does?

Thanks guys

Answer 1

1. Handle any special characters you wanna use (Umlauts for example)
2. Remove any non-alpha-numeric-characters that are left
3. handle white spaces

Something like that for example:

function _getSlugFromName($name){
   return preg_replace('#[\s]+#','-',preg_replace('#[^\d\w -]*#','',str_replace(array('ä','ü','ö','ß'),array('ae','ue','oe','ss'),html_entity_decode(mb_strtolower(trim($name),'UTF-8'),ENT_COMPAT,'UTF-8'))));
}

Answer 2

You can also do this with rewrite rules. A rule like this in your config file:

'controller/<slug:[\w\-]+>'=>'controller/view',

will take a URL like this:

controller/my-slug

and it will redirect to the actionView() in your Controller, and pass the slug ("my-slug") in as a $_GET variable. With that rewrite rule you now call $_GET['slug'] and it will return "my-slug" from the url.

I have a "slug" row as a primary key so then I just query the DB for $_GET['slug'] in my actionView() and I get the correct record based on the URL. Works like a charm. Good luck!

UPDATE To get rid of the controller prefix in addition to using a slug, you will probably need one large table to keep track of all url slugs (to prevent duplicates). If you have that, then you could do a couple of different things:

1 Override onBeginRequest to do a lookup on the master slug table to figure out which Controller to call. 2. Use a master rewrite to a single ActionIndex in the SiteController, and in that action look up the slug in the master table to figure out which controller/action to send the user to. The rewrite rule would look something like this:

'<slug:[\w\-]+>'=>'site/index',