Changing shirt.php URL to SEO friendly URL

This is very common - you might see this type of thing being referred to as a 'slug'. It's essentially using a unique string instead of a integer to grab the correct data from your database. It exists as a column in your database - just like ID, Name or Description, you'll need a column for 'slug'.

You can see it in action right here on the Treehouse forums - take a look at the url! You have to make sure a slug is unique. For example on Treehouse, If you create a question with the same name as one that already exists, the code will add incrementing numbers to the end of the url friendly question name (slug) to keep it unique. It will still have a unique integer ID in the database, and it's highly likely database joins etc will be using the ID, not the slug.

It might go a little something like this:

1. Validate product name.
2. Create slug from product name.
3. Compare new slug to existing slugs.
4. If it's already in use, add a number to the end.
5. Do steps 3 and 4 until you have a unique slug.
6. Commit everything to the database.

This wouldn't be a great way because if you have 9 products e.g. pots-and-pans-1, pots-and-pans-2, pots-and-pans-3 etc... you would have to run 9 database queries until you hit a unique slug. It would probably be better to do one query where you search for all slugs LIKE the new slug name.. and then order the results by the date they were created or chop off the final number and order by that. Anyway, I digress - if that doesn't make sense to you now, it hopefully will after trial and error! I think you'll use the LIKE statement in future videos on this course.

It is quite a fun exercise to write a small class or function that will turn a product title or question title into a URL friendly slug - think about characters that you'll have to replace and what they should be replaced with. Having said that, packages are already in existence.

Top package search results:

(Be aware that I haven't tested these or read reviews - therefore they may be unsecure. Check this out before using them on any projects!)

• cviebrock/eloquent-sluggable - I think this might be more suitable for Laravel.
• kevinlebrun/slug
• cocur/slugify

If you're unfamiliar with packages and composer, Treehouse have just released some videos that teach you what they are and how they're use it. It's Badge Number Three - Auto loading and Composer.

Function

• slug function suggestion on Stack Overflow

Hope this points you in the right direction!