Last week I spent an entire week of leave on JungleDragon development. This week I will be sharing the progress in little bits and pieces. Today's topic is friendly URLs.

Friendly URLs are considered to be quite important nowadays, and for good reasons:

• SEO (Search Engine Optimization). The more descriptive your URL, the better the indexing.
• Usability. Friendly URLs are more usable, recognizable and memorable by users, also in bookmarks and print.
• Architecture. Friendly URLs can hide the back-end technologies used for the web application. 

Luckily, the framework that I am using to develop JungleDragon (CodeIgniter) supports friendly URLs out of the box. For example, a URL like this...

http://www.jungledragon.com/image/view/123456

Will call the "View" method of the "Image" controller and pass in the value "123456". All of this is default behavior, which can be overruled and refined in the routes file. From there it is easy to make the above URL slightly better:

$route['image/(:any)'] = "image/view/$1";

This makes the URL look like this:

http://www.jungledragon.com/image/123456

We have gotten rid of the unneccessary "View" URL segment. For long I stopped here. I knew it would be better to include the image title in the URL, but I had this unexplained worry that it would take a lot of effort to encode and decode that title to look up images, especially considering I am supporting UTF8.

This post from Jake Howlett was a breakthrough in my thinking. There is no need to substitute the numeric id with the title to look up images. We can simply combine them like so:

http://www.jungledragon.com/image/123456/eagle-in-mid-air.html

This can easily be accomplished with the following routing rules:

$route['image/(:any)/(:any).html'] = "image/view/$1"; 
$route['image/(:any)'] = "image/view/$1"; 

Basically, these rules say: "I do not care what you place behind the image id, the image id will always be used as the lookup key". Therefore we can place the image title behind the key to create truly friendly URLs. Note that in CodeIgniter, there is a function to create URL safe titles: url_title().

I have implemented the above URL scheme for images, tags, users, pages and classes.

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