On Apr 17, 2011, at 10:44, AD7six wrote: > On Apr 17, 4:06 am, Ryan Schmidt wrote: >> On Apr 15, 2011, at 08:57, AD7six wrote: >>> $_GET['url'] = strtolower($_GET['url']); anywhere (e.g., line 1 of >>> your index.php) will do the deed - and if you put a canonical meta tag >>> in your page, you avoid any duplicate content problems too. >> >> $_GET['url']? That's new to me. Is that something CakePHP does? Is there >> documentation on it? >> >> Even if it does what I think it does, then your suggestion would only >> address the first part (making URLs work case-insensitively) and would not >> address the second part (ensuring there is a single canonical URL for each >> resource and redirecting non-canonical ones to the canonical one). > > I too have difficulty reading to the end of a sent
I'm sure you didn't mean it, but that response came across as rude. I had not heard of putting a canonical URL in the meta tag, so I searched, and found this information: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html It appears you just put a link rel="canonical" tag in your header with an href attribute pointing at the canonical URL. Google uses this information to know which pages are to be considered the same, and what their official URL is. I would continue to assert that this does not take care of *redirecting* the user from a non-canonical URL to a canonical one, which was the behavior I was advocating. Perhaps redirecting is not necessary as far as Google is concerned, but it seems like a meta tag would not assist the *user* in knowing what the canonical URL is, unless the browser supports rel="canonical" tags and displays them somewhere (are there any browsers that do this?) If I visit http://apple.com/ I am not shown the Apple homepage with a rel="canonical" meta tag stating that the official URL is actually http://www.apple.com/; instead, I am redirected to http://www.apple.com/ . This way, the official URL is in the browser's address bar, so the user sees it. Same thing if I visit http://www.apple.com/airport/ -- I'm redirected to http://www.apple.com/wifi/ , because that is the canonical URL for that information. This is the behavior I'm talking about and for which I was trying to suggest CakePHP solutions. Can you provide any guidance on $_GET['url']? As I said, I hadn't heard of that before either, and I'm having trouble finding information about it in Google or directly in the CakePHP book. Are you referring to $this->params['url']? http://book.cakephp.org/view/971/url If that's what you're talking about, then that book page doesn't give any information about why one might want to use this, what one can do with it (e.g. you're suggesting that lowercasing it will have some effect on CakePHP's later processing), etc. -- Our newest site for the community: CakePHP Video Tutorials http://tv.cakephp.org Check out the new CakePHP Questions site http://ask.cakephp.org and help others with their CakePHP related questions. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/cake-php
