[NicolasVH]

Hello!

My Yii powered website has been live for about a month now (http://tasta.be) and it's going pretty good. Right now, I'm heavily invested in SEO. I've managed to make my URLs a little bit more URL friendly: http://tasta.be/videos/20 for example, but then I got stuck.

I got the documentation and read all of it, but I think I'm currently not making the click to wrap my head around it. There are two things I want to accomplish, but I fail trying to do so:

• I've got a URL-field in my database for my videos model, so the ideal situation would be: http://tasta.be/videos/id-urlfield/. An example would be: http://tasta.be/vide...ook-antichamber (/videos/view / should redirect to the one without view as well, because now Google is complaining about two URLs for the same page)
  
• Pretty much the same but for my categories (example: http://tasta.be/videocategorie/view/1), should be /videocategorie/urlfield or even better: tasta.be/url-field

Maybe this is a lot to ask, but without help I don't think I'm ever going to achieve what I want. My current .htaccess looks like this:

RewriteEngine on

# if a directory or a file exists, use it directly
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

# otherwise forward it to index.php
RewriteRule . index.php

If somebody could help me, I would be so grateful. If I manage to get it working, I'll give away some Steam codes for Dungeonland and The Showdown Effect as a token of my appreciation.

[softark]

Hello Nicolas, welcome to the forum.

I don't have much experience in this area, but it seems that "Custom URL Rule Class" is exactly what you need.
http://www.yiiframew...rl-rule-classes
I think you can easily implement your own.

BTW, nice site.

[Cstdenis]

It sounds like what you are trying to do should be fairly simple

a rule like 'videos/<id:\d+>' => 'videos/view' should get you what you have now.

To change to your new format you would want to add a new rule before it like (the .+ can be replaced by a more specific regex if appropriate like [A-Za-z0-9_-]+).

'videos/<id:\d+>-<urlfield:.+>' => 'videos/view'


As for the redirects, here is the way I did that. Each relevant action calls this function near it's start to redirect if necessary. The $url parameter can be created with Yii::app()->createUrl() as you would creating links to it anywhere else.

	/**
	 * Redirect to the specified URL if we are not already there.
	 * 
	 * This is necessary for SEO optimization (search engines penalize for duplicate content at different URLs).
	 * Duplicate URLs will happen because of stuff like picture/story titles changing, category hierarchy changes, 
	 * and simply all the old URLs that are redirected to the new ones. 
	 * 
	 * @param String $url The correct URL for this page
	 */
	function redirectCanonicalURL($url)
	{
		if(Yii::app()->request->requestUri != $url)
		{	
			//header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently"); 
			header("Location: $url", true, 301);
			Yii::app()->end();
		}		
	}

Softark's method would also work and is more powerful, but is probably less efficient if the simple url rules do what you need.

[le_top]

Not doing the redirect, but using canonical url tags should be good enough for google:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://example.com/" />

[softark]

Yes, Cstdenis's proposal looks quite reasonable.
I think usually we don't need to hide "id".