yet another seo url question

[eluser]boltsabre[/eluser]
Okay, your first question you stated you don't want to pass the ad id around in the URL, and then your first reply you said it was a good idea! LOL, not sure what you wanna do now! (eidt, opps, just re-read your reply comment, your were talking about combining the id and the seo slug together into one part of the uri, and then extracting the id later, I'd personally forget that option, too much mucking around, just have /controller/id/seoTitle or controller/seoTitle/id, or some such, it wont affect your 'google rankings' if you have an ID in there as it's own URI segment.)

- Anyway, forget using flash data, if someone does a page refresh you loose your data... not good!
- You could try using a session to store the ID, but then some people have cookies disabled (which is how CI stores session data by default, but you could set it up to be stored in a DB rather than a cookie, but thats another story, but could help you).
- Another option would be to do it all with forms and set the ID as a hidden field. So a person goes and views a bunch of Ads under the category Pet Supplies (for example). You echo out your ads, each one wrapped inside a form with the ID as a hidden field. Then use a button or image (or whatever) to 'action' that form (perhaps they click on it and it takes then to a detailed view of the ad, whatever it is). This will work, but the only problem with this is that SEARCH ENGINE SPIDERS cannot submit forms, and as such it will limit how much they will crawl your site. Perhaps this is an issue for your site, perhaps not, I'm not sure. But you can get around this problem (to some extent) with the use of an XML site map and/or a html site map in your footer. But again, that's another story.

Personally I'd just tack to ID somewhere in the URL. I do it with my forums and stuff, and it's not an issue for me. You just wouldn't want to do it for secure data (well duh!) like a User ID or some such.

Hope that helps a bit, let us know how your getting along with it!