I have recently started to be more interested in upgrading my skills for search engine optimization. This category will contain my learnings in this area. The problem with starting reading about new things is that most of the articles contain lot of abbreviations and sometimes without their full forms, you might loose the essence of what they really are talking about. Most people might already be familiar with these, but I am listing most of them just as a good starting point for anyone starting to read:

SEO

Search Engine Optimization

SEM

Search Engine Marketing

PR

Page Rank

CPC

Cost Per Click

PPC

Pay Per Click

CTR

Click-trough Rate

Landing Page

A Keyword focussed page designed to convert

“Above the fold”

First screen of page visible.

SERP

Search Engine Results Page

ROI

Return on investment

If there are some more that you know off, please add them in the comments section.

So here’s the url that I was looking for. 

http://testsite.rajatpandit.com/university/Indian_institute_of_management_ahemdabad.html

I got to the point where I had functional code which gave me URLs like these:

http://testsite.rajatpandit.com/university/id/1

These are the steps to convert the URLs are humanly understandable.
Step 1:
Add additional field to the university table to store the modified name. So update the schema to addt the additional field.
[yml]
university:
_attribute: {phpName: University}
id: {type: integer, required: true, primaryKey: true, autoincrement: true}
name: varchar(256)
stripped_name: varchar(256)
website: varchar(256)
country: varchar(2)
city: varchar(256)
body: longvarchar
approved: boolean
created_at:
updated_at:
[/yml]

Obviously you would need to do the regular to regenerate the models.

#symfony propel-build-model
#symfony propel-build-sql
#symfony propel-insert-sql

or do it all in one easy step.

#symfony propel-build-all

Step 2:
Now modify the model to update the new column (stripped_name) every time the standard setName($v) is called. For that we need to have a helper function that does this. Here’s the code I used, you can use your own version.

function stripText($text) {
  $text = strtolower($text);
  $text = preg_replace('/\W/', ' ', $text);
  $text = preg_replace('/\ +/', '_', $text);
  $text = preg_replace('/\-$/', '', $text);
  $text = preg_replace('/^\-/', '', $text);
  return $text;
}

I create a new file called CustomHelper.php and store in under lib/helper/ and then update the model class for University to override the function setName($v) with the following function.

public function setName($v)
  {
    include_once('lib/helper/CustomHelper.php');
    parent::setName($v);
    $this->setStrippedName(stripText($v));
  }

That will ensure that the new column stripped_name gets updated.

Step 3:
Update your php template where you create the links to the following code.

<ul>
  <?php foreach($universities as $university): ?>
    <li>
      <?php echo link_to($university->getName(), '@university_display?stripped_name=' . stripText($university->getName())); ?>
    </li>
  <?php endforeach; ?>
</ul>

and update the routing.yml to match the routing name used.

[yml]
article_display:
url: /article/:stripped_title.html
param: {module: home, action: article}
[/yml]
The routing rule reads out like this,
When you see the url containing /article/<something>.html redirect it to module: home to its action article and assign a request parameter <stripped_html> to <something>.

and that’s all you need to do to get your urls look all nice and clean.