Cor Cinza by Éber Freitas Dias

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On the web, “slug” is a short text used in a URL to identify and describe a resource. As Mariano Iglesias’ Sluggable Behavior decription says:

This is particularly useful to create SEO links out of, for example, a table of articles. Instead of seeing those ugly /articles/view/4 URLs, use the Sluggable Behavior and easily accept URLs such as /articles/view/my-seo-friendly-article. It handles the slug creation, slug collision, and allows you to specify different settings such as the separator to use, maximum width of a slug, among other useful parameters.

My Sluggable Behavior is a simpler version of Mariano Iglesias’ Sluggable Behavior with a few add-ons. It’s basically the same thing but instead of implementing all the slug logic on the behavior, it just uses Cake’s Inflector::slug() method. With CakePHP 1.3, this method is really powerful and flexible.

To use it, just place the behavior file on the proper place and call it on the model you want to “slugify”:

var $actsAs = array('Sluggable');

By default, this will automatically create slugs from a field named “title” and place it under a field named “slug”. If you want, you can customize everything. Checkout the configuration keys:

var $actsAs = array(
	'Sluggable' => array(
		'fields' => 'title',
		'scope' => false,
		'conditions' => false,
		'slugfield' => 'slug',
		'separator' => '-',
		'overwrite' => false,
		'length' => 256,
		'lower' => true
	)
);

Those are all the default values. Let’s check what they can do, one by one:

• fields: as you can see, this is where you define which field will provide the content to the slug. You can inform more than one with an array.
• scope: after generating a slug, the system will check for similar slugs on the database in order to generate a unique slug. By default, it will scan all your registries, but you can define scopes. Example: you want the system to use an already registered slug on a different category. You can define an array like this: ‘scope’ => array(‘category_id’). The system will only check for records where the “category_id” is the same from the data being saved.
• conditions: these are extra conditions you can inform. The system will scan for similar slugs previously registered on the database using those conditions as well. They work just like a normal find conditions array.
• slugfield: the name of the field that will store the slug on the database.
• separator: the character that will be used to replace white spaces on the slug.
• overwrite: if true, this will replace the slug from a record on update, otherwise it will be kept untouched on a update.
• length: this defines the length of the slug text.
• lower: if false, the behavior won’t make the slug all lower case.

Once again, this behavior is totally inspired by Mariano Iglesias’ Sluggable Behaviour. If you want to help, please comment! Here is the source code: