Archive for June, 2009
SEO Friendly URLs
Let’s say you have a site which has movie reviews. To display a unique review, you would have a PHP page, for example review.php, which obtains the id of the review and shows the title and description of that review. So, if you want to see the review with id 45, you need to access the following URL: http://yoursite.com/review.php?id=45
Do you see a problem with this? No? Are you sure? Ok, then I’ll have to explain it. With that type of URL, you are not able to know anything about the review. It could be a review for “Casablanca” just as easily as it could a review for “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective”. And that’s not the biggest problem; it is also a bad SEO URL!
How can you fix this? Use SEO Friendly URLs.
Requirements: Apache (with mod_rewrite module) installed on your server (most hosting services already have this).
Step 1: Insert the following code on you PHP script
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 | function StrToSearchFriendlyURL($s) { if(!$s) return 'page'; $s = strtolower(htmlentities($s, ENT_QUOTES, $GLOBALS['CHARSET'])); $s = preg_replace('/&(.)(?:acute|cedil|circ|ring|tilde|uml|grave|elig|slash);/', '\\1', $s); $s = preg_replace('/\W+/', '_', html_entity_decode($s)); $s = preg_replace('/_{2,}/','_',$s); $s = trim($s,'_'); if(!$s) $s = 'page'; return $s; } |
Step 2: Apply the above function to your regular URLs to make them SEO Friendy.
Step 3: When inserting the new URLs on your page, add a dash (-), the review id and html extension at the end.
Example:
1 | <a href="{SEO_friendly_URL}-{id}.html">{$review_title}</a> |
Step 4: Create a .htaccess file with the following content.
1 2 3 4 | Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine On RewriteRule ^[^-]+-([0-9]+)\.html$ review.php?id=$1 [L] |
Step 5: Place the .htaccess file on your site’s document root.
That’s it! The URLs on your site will now look something like this: http://yoursite.com/casablanca-45.html which will be interpreted by Apache like http://yoursite.com/review.php?id=45
More about mod_rewrite: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/mod/mod_rewrite.html
More about .htaccess files: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/howto/htaccess.html
Grails Tips Part I – Domain Classes
I have been working a lot with Grails lately and I have to say that I love it!
It has allowed me to create some great web applications in a very fast and reliable way. While developing these applications, I learned a lot of useful things that I would like to share to you. Today I’ll give you some tips regarding Domain Classes.
1) Date created & Last Updated
If you want Grails to handle the date in which an object is created and the last time it was updated, all you have to do is add the following attributes to your domain class:
1 2 | Date dateCreated Date lastUpdated |
As easy as that! Grails will automatically set the value for this two attributes when an object is created and every time it is updated.
2) Field order
If you want Grails to generate the fields for the create, edit & show views in a particular order, just define that order on the constraints. If the attribute doesn’t require a specific constraint (such as maxSize, unique, nullable, etc), just put the attribute on the constraints and leave the constraint empty.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 | static constraints = { name() address() city(nullable:true, blank:true) phone(nullable:true, blank:true) mobile(nullable:true, blank:true) email(email:true) } |
3) Unique by group
If you want an attribute on a domain class to be unique, but only grouped by another attribute, you can do it. In the following example, the company name will be unique only for companies from the same client:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 | class Company { Client client String name String address static constraints = { name(size:3..50, blank:false, unique:'client') address() } } |
4) Change database mapping for String attribute
Grails will map the String attributes on your domain class to varchar(255) by default. If you want a String attribute mapped to text, here’s how you do it:
1 2 3 4 5 | static mapping = { columns{ attribute_name type:"text" } } |
Stay tuned for more Grails tips!