SEO implement?

[eluser]Stuey[/eluser]
I'm currently very new to all of this and have been tinkering with the very same approach to my own little blog.

I've basically taken the approach of setting up a route in config/routes.php that goes something along the lines of:

Code:

$route['blog/(:num)'] = "blog/view/$1";
$route['blog/(:num)/(:any)'] = "blog/view/$1/$2";

Then in my controller I have this:

Code:

function view($post_id=null,$sef_url="")
    {
        /* Don't forget this relies on a custom ROUTE */
        
        // Fetch post by id or throw 404
        if (!isset($post_id)) {
            show_404($this->uri->uri_string());
        }


        $this->load->model('blog_model');
            

        if ($this->db->conn_id == "")
        {
            show_error("Could not connect to the database with the current settings.");
        }
            
        // Fetch post by id or throw 404
        if (!$row = $this->blog_model->get($post_id)) {
            show_404($this->uri->uri_string());
        }
            
        // Do a 301 redirect if sef_url is not a match
        if ($sef_url != $row['sef_url']) {
            redirect(site_url('/blog/view/' . $post_id . '/' . $row['sef_url']), 'location', 301);
        }
        
        // All is well. Display post.
        $this->data['post'] = $row;        
        $this->load->view('post_view', $this->data);
    }

Basically my URI structure contains the post ID, so that you could enter "/blog/view/123/whatever-slug-line-i-want" and it would still go to the correct article.

If the slug/SEO friendly URL (sef_url in my case) doesn't match, it redirects to the correct post anyway. You could replace the ID in my example with a alias lookup.

Probably could be done better than this, but I'm still learning.

Hope that helps.