Struggling to generate a unique slug

tonyastley · Aug 21st 2020

I'm trying to create a unique slug for news articles.

I've seen reference in other forum posts about being able to combine multiple ids, however I cannot get it to work.

Code

<perch:content id="_id" suppress="true" />
<perch:content id="title" type="Text" label="Title" title suppress />
<perch:content id="slug" type="slug" for="title _id" suppress="true" />

This only ever generates the slug using the title, it does not append the _ID on the first save, only the second save once the id field has been populated.

Is there an easier way to get a unique slug as some of the articles will most likely share a title.

hus_hmd · Aug 21st 2020

Hi Tony,

The slug you generate does not need to include the item's unique ID in order for you to use it in the item's URL and when fetching the item from the database. The item's URL in your template can be something like this:

HTML

<a href="/post.php?s=<perch:content id="slug">-<perch:content id="_id">">
<perch:content id=title">
</a>

In your PHP page, you can get the value of ?s= (i.e. the item's slug in this case) with perch_get('s') and separate the last segment of the slug:

PHP

// get complete slug from URL e.g. perch-is-awesome-32
$slug = perch_get('s');
// split the slug into parts - you get an array ['perch', 'is', 'awesome', '32']
$slug_parts = explode('-', $slug);
// get the last part (the ID) and remove it from $slug_parts
$ID = array_pop($slug_parts);
// glue back the slug (without the ID)
$title_slug = implode('-', $slug_parts);
// query the database
perch_collection('Blog', [
'filter' => [
[
'filter' => '_id',
'value' => $ID,
],
[
'filter' => 'slug',
'value' => $title_slug,
],
],
]);

Display More

I'd personally use the _id option (because Perch uses a faster a database query with it), and check the slug from the URL matches the slug I get from the database in PHP:

PHP

$item = perch_collection('Blog', [
'_id' => $ID,
'skip-template' => true,
'return-html' => true,
]);