SEO-friendly URLs in CodeIgniter without the use of slugs?

I've only been working with CodeIgniter for the past couple of months in my spare time, so I'm still learning, but I'll take a shot at this (be gentle):

There is a url_title() function in the URL Helper (which will need loaded, of course) that will change Foo Bar to foo-bar.

$name = 'Foo Bar';$seo_name = url_title($name, TRUE);// Produces: foo-bar

http://codeigniter.com/user_guide/helpers/url_helper.html

The URL helper strips illegal characters and throws in the hyphens by default (underscores, by parameter) and the TRUE parameter will lowercase everything.

To solve your problem, I suppose you could either do a foreach statement in your routes.php file or pass the url_title() value to the URL, rather than the ID, and modify your code to match the url_title() value with its category name in the DB.

Afaik the link between 4 and "foo-bar" has to be stored in the DB, so you'll have to run some queries. This is usually not done via routing in CI. Also routing just points a URL to a controller and function and has little to do with url rewriting.

Why don't you want to use slugs?

You could try storing the search engine friendly route in the database using this method or this one.

I wouldn't recommend throwing a 404. Use the canonical link tag in the instead if your worried about Google indexing both http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html.

But if you really want to I guess you could write a function that is called during the pre_controller hook http://codeigniter.com/user_guide/general/hooks.html that checks to see if the URL has an integer as the second segment then call the show_404() method. Perhaps a better solution when writing this function would be to redirect to the SEO friendly version.