SEO: Building Pretty URL (Slugs) With CakePHP

The word “slug” was probably popularized by wordpress thanks to its ability to build pretty looking urls or permalinks for all of your post title.

Cakephp has a class known as Inflector and a slug method which does the same thing to help you get a pretty looking slug for any text strings you pass into it. Here’s how.

Let’s say you have a string variable:

$str = “SEO Keyword Targeting with Permalinks”

In any of your controller’s action, just do this

$permalink = Inflector::slug($str, ‘-‘);

and you’ll have “SEO-Keyword-Targeting-with-Permalinks” for your permalink.

Need all letter to be lowercase? No problem, just use the php function strtolower

$permalink = Inflector::slug(strtolower($str), ‘-‘);

Note that Inflector::slug expects a utf8 encoded string, so in order to take care of strings such as “apple purée”, you should doing

$permalink = Inflector::slug(utf8_encode(strtolower(apple purée)), ‘-‘);