Beautifying URLs

The URLs linking various pages of our blog application currently look ugly. For example, the URL for the page showing a post looks like the following:

/index.php?r=post/show&id=1&title=A+Test+Post

In this section, we describe how to beautify these URLs and make them SEO-friendly. Our goal is to be able to use the following URLs in the application:

1. /index.php/posts/yii: leads to the page showing a list of posts with tag yii;
2. /index.php/post/2/A+Test+Post: leads to the page showing the detail of the post with ID 2 whose title is A Test Post;
3. /index.php/post/update?id=1: leads to the page that allows updating the post with ID 1.

Note that in the second URL format, we include the post title in the URL. This is mainly to make the URL SEO friendly. It is said that search engines may also respect the words found in a URL when it is being indexed.

To achieve our goal, we modify the application configuration as follows,

return array(
    ......
    'components'=>array(
        ......
        'urlManager'=>array(
            'urlFormat'=>'path',
            'rules'=>array(
                'post/<id:\d+>/<title:.*?>'=>'post/view',
                'posts/<tag:.*?>'=>'post/index',
                '<controller:\w+>/<action:\w+>'=>'<controller>/<action>',
            ),
        ),
    ),
);

In the above, we configure the urlManager component by setting its urlFormat property to be path and adding a set of rules.

The rules are used by urlManager to parse and create the URLs in the desired format. For example, the second rule says that if a URL /index.php/posts/yii is requested, the urlManager component should be responsible to dispatch the request to the route post/index and generate a tag GET parameter with the value yii. On the other hand, when creating a URL with the route post/index and parameter tag, the urlManager component will also use this rule to generate the desired URL /index.php/posts/yii. For this reason, we say that urlManager is a two-way URL manager.

The urlManager component can further beautify our URLs, such as hiding index.php in the URLs, appending suffix like .html to the URLs. We can obtain these features easily by configuring various properties of urlManager in the application configuration. For more details, please refer to the Guide.