Yii advanced url rewrite

Question

pay attention to that ANYTHING_ELSE So, I have my controllers and actions that I want to behave as normal in response to examples like this:

// for UserContoller         


        

Answer 1

I shall explain step by step how to get this working.

Step 1 - Create an Yii web app

Navigate to your Yii framework path in your console and create a new webapp. In my case I used this in my console:

cd c:\zeus\yii-1.1.10.r3566\framework
yiic webapp c:\zeus\www\yiiblog

where c:\zeus\yii-1.1.10.r3566\framework is my path to Yii php framework and c:\zeus\www\yiiblog is the path to my Yii webapp test folder

Stept 2 - fake my domain to dev.yiiblog.com

Go to C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc and edit your hosts file by adding this line:

127.0.0.1 dev.yiiblog.com

Step 3 - alter apache httpd.conf file

    DocumentRoot "c:/zeus/www/yiiblog"
    ServerName dev.yiiblog.com
    ErrorLog "logs/dev.yiiblog.com-error.log"
    CustomLog "logs/dev.yiiblog.com-access.log" common

and restart apache service. I used in my windows console:

net stop apache
net start apache

where my Apache 2 service is named "apache" not "apache2.2" like the default one.

Step 4 - create a database and configure a database connection into Yii

I've created a database yiitest and a user yiitest. Then I opened my Yii configuration file located ad /protected/config/main.php and edited the connection to MySQL:

'db'=>array(
  'connectionString' => 'mysql:host=localhost;dbname=yiitest',
  'emulatePrepare' => true,
  'username' => 'yiitest',
  'password' => 'password',
  'charset' => 'utf8',
),

Step 5 - download dburlmanager Yii extension

Go to Yii dburlmanager, download the Yii dburlmanager extension http://www.yiiframework.com/extension/dburlmanager/ and extract it to your /protected/extensions folder

Step 6 - Create MySQL database tables and add dummy data

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `articles` (
  `seoURL` varchar(100) NOT NULL
) ENGINE=InnoDB;

INSERT INTO `articles` (`seoURL`) VALUES
('first-post'),
('another-post'),
('post/value'),
('website/page1');

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `pages` (
  `seoURL` varchar(100) NOT NULL
) ENGINE=InnoDB;

INSERT INTO `pages` (`seoURL`) VALUES
('page-first-post'),
('page-another-post'),
('page/post/value.html'),
('page-website/page1');

Step 7 - Create your Yii custom Controllers

Create under /protected/controllers folder two php files named ArticleController.php and PageController.php:

ArticleController.php content:

render('view', array(
      'article' => isset($_GET['article'])?$_GET['article']:'',
    ));
  }
}

PageController.php content:

render('view', array(
      'page' => isset($_GET['page'])?$_GET['page']:'',
    ));
  }
}

Step 8 - create your custom Yii views

Create your view files corresponding to those controllers above with the path /protected/views/article/view.php and /protected/views/page/view.php:

Article view content:

Article View Test

Page view content:

Page View Test

Step 9 - add custom Yii url rules

Open again your main.php Yii config file and set your urlManager to something similar to:

'urlManager'=>array(
  'urlFormat'=>'path',
  'class'=>'ext.DbUrlManager.EDbUrlManager',
  'connectionID'=>'db',
  'rules'=>array(
    ''=>array(
      'article/view',
      'type'=>'db',
      'fields'=>array(
        'article'=>array(
          'table'=>'articles',
          'field'=>'seoURL'
        ),
      ),
    ),

    ''=>array(
      'page/view',
      'type'=>'db',
      'fields'=>array(
        'page'=>array(
          'table'=>'pages',
          'field'=>'seoURL'
        ),
      ),
    ),

    '/' => '/view',
    '//' => '/',
    '/' => '/',
  ),
  'showScriptName'=>false,
),

Step 10 - create .htaccess file

Create a .htaccess file under your web app root and etid its content to:

Options +FollowSymLinks
IndexIgnore */*
RewriteEngine on

# if a directory or a file exists, use it directly
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

# otherwise forward it to index.php
RewriteRule . index.php

Step 11 - test your SEO Friendly URLs

dev.yiiblog.com/first-post
dev.yiiblog.com/page-first-post

etc

Have fun creating awesome blogs or other web apps with complete url managing power.