When I first started using the Zend Framework I didn’t give much thought into the way it handles routing URLs to the controllers/action combo. Honestly, while I had become used to so called search engine friendly, or pretty, URLs, I grew up on query strings where the idea of URLs was more about function than form. So when I moved over to Zend Framework as a framework I didn’t give a damn how the URLs were parsed and routed to which controller/action. I just accepted the natural order of things.

Recently though, I took on a project to build a sort of quick and dirty CMS with a couple unique requirements:

1. It had to use the Zend Framework
2. URLs would be broken down into a /category/page/subpage scheme.

This was the first time I’ve ever had a client demand a project use the Zend Framework. Pretty cool. But, this presented a problem because, as mentioned above, by default the Zend Framework has URL schemes based on the controller and action you’re looking to access like /controller/action/. This just wouldn’t work.

Since the clients URLs would mostly be based on user generated strings, what we were calling URL slugs, the default routing scheme just wouldn’t do. I say mostly because there were other areas of the project that would use the normal scheme for a couple modules. Either way, thankfully, using Zend_Controller_Router_Route made this pretty much a snap (a little head bashing but not too much).

First though, a little background. Because of the above requirement from the client on URL schemes, I was thinking the best thing to do was to route all user generated URLs to to a single controller and handle the rest from there. I looked but there didn’t seem to be any easy way to route all URLs except the specific modules I wanted to exclude which meant I had to pull out the categories and iterate over them to create each route individually. (If anyone knows of a way to reverse the design and create a route for everything but certain strings let me know.)

To do this, in my bootstrap class I just created a new _init function like the below:

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//bootstrap
public function _initRoutes()
{
	$url_data = $this->cat->getCategoryUrls();
	$frontController = Zend_Controller_Front::getInstance();
	$router = $frontController->getRouter();
	foreach($url_data AS $url)
	{
 
		$route = new Zend_Controller_Router_Route (
			$url.'/*',
			array('controller' => 'pages',
			'action' => 'index')
		);
 
		$router->addRoute($url, $route);
	}
}

In a nutshell, all the above is doing is looping over an array of category URL slugs and adding a custom route for each category that sends all requests to the Pages controller and the Index action. From there I parse the URL and proceed accordingly for the rest of the module.

For this example I’m doing a couple thing; using the Zend_Controller_Router_Route class and using wild cards (*). The Zend_Controller_Router_Route class takes two parameters, the first being the route and the second being an array of options (I’m only passing the controller and action but it’s possible to send others). For the route, and because it’s using the wildcard (*), I’m basically saying take any requests for the “url_slug” and anything after it and use the controller “Pages” and the “Index” action to handle everything.

After passing the Zend_Controller_Router_Route object to the $router, passing the unique name for the route as the first parameter, I was good to go.

That said, there’s a lot more that can be done with the custom routing stuff within the Zend Framework above what’s outlined above. There’s a pretty good article by Jason Gilmore that goes into some detail into how to create default URL parameters to make the URLs look even prettier. Definitely worth checking out.