Search-engine-friendly URL’s using the Jake bridge

A few months ago I posted my experience using the Jake bridge between CakePHP and Joomla. Overall it’s pretty slick, but with one annoyance: the URL’s are not search-engine-friendly. Moreover they broadcast your frameworks of choice which is not a good from a security viewpoint.

So after much research into the Joomla component routing and how the framework parses SEF URL’s, I came up with the following upgrade to Jake, which allows much prettier URLs.

This presumes that you have your Cake app installed in a subdirectory of your Joomla webroot (assume it’s “/webapp”). Secondly, decide upon the SEF base you want to use – it must be different from the former since you want to force it to route the request through Joomla and that requires a path that doesn’t correspond to a physical directory (I chose “/app” to be nondescript).

1. Update your /.htaccess file to add a rewrite rule, before the core SEF section, for this new SEF base path:

   ...
   RewriteBase /
    
   # For Jake: redirect everything that starts with app/
   # See http://www.phpbb-seo.com/en/apache-mod-rewrite/article3226.html for more details
   RewriteRule	^app\/(.*)$	/index.php?option=com_jake&jrun=/$1		[QSA,L]
    
   ########## Begin - Joomla! core SEF Section
   #
   ...

2. In /components/lib/cake_embedded_dispatcher_class.php:597, replace _changeUrl() with the following:

            /**
   	* Base for SEF URI's
   	*
   	* @since 1.1
   	* @var string
   	*/
   	var $sefCakeApplicationBase = null;
    
   	/**
   	 * Set base path to CakePHP application, using SEF URL's.
   	 *
   	 * @param string $base	Base path to Cake application in SEF URI
   	 *
   	 * @access public
   	 * @since 1.1
   	 */
   	function setSefCakeApplicationBase($base)
   	{
   		$this->sefCakeApplicationBase = $base;
   	}
    
   	function _changeUrl($start, $p1, $url, $p3, $ending, $startUrl='href="', $endUrl='"', $useComponent = true, $clean = false)
   	{
   		if (isset($this->sefCakeApplicationBase))
   		{
   			$newUrl = $this->sefCakeApplicationBase . $url;
   		}
   		else
   		{
   			// Patterns to match URLs that should not pass through the component
    
   			$passThroughLinksMatching = array('/\.jpg$/i', '/\.png$/i', '/\.gif$/i', '/\.pdf$/i', '/\.rss$/i');
    
   			if ($useComponent && isset($passThroughLinksMatching))
   			{
   				foreach($passThroughLinksMatching as $element)
   				{
   					if (preg_match($element, $url))
   					{
   						$useComponent = false;
   						break;
   					}
   				}
   			}
    
   			if ($useComponent)
   			{
   				$newUrl = str_replace('$CAKE_ACTION', urlencode($url), $this->component);
    
   				if (!empty($this->cakeUrlAddParameters))
   				{
   					$newUrl .= '&' . $this->cakeUrlAddParameters;
   				}
    
   				if ($clean)
   				{
   					$newUrl .= '&' . $this->cleanOutputParameter;
   				}
   			}
   			else
   			{
   				$newUrl = $this->cakeUrlBase . $url;
   			}
   		}
    
   		$newUrl = str_replace('&', '&', $newUrl);
    
   		$result = $start . $p1;
   		$result .= $startUrl . $newUrl . $endUrl;
   		$result .= $p3 . $ending;
    
   		$result = stripslashes($result);
    
   		return $result;
   	}

3. In /components/lib/jake.class.php:160, add this new method to be used in place of getUrl():

            **
   	 * Gets the SEF URL to execute the specified CakePHP action with Jake
   	 *
   	 * @param string $action	CakePHP URL. (leave empty for default cake action)
   	 *
   	 * @return string	A valid Jake URL
   	 *
   	 * @access public
   	 * @since 1.1
   	 */
   	function getSefUrl($action = '', $sefCakeApplicationBase = '')
   	{
   		return $this->joomlaUrl . $sefCakeApplicationBase . $action;
   	}

4. In /components/com_jake/jake_front_component_class.php:89, add these lines:

   		// Set the SEF URL to match the rewrite rule in /.htaccess
   		$cakeDispatcher->setSefCakeApplicationBase('/app');

5. And finally, in your app_controller.php, you can “Jakeify” an ordinary CakePHP URL to the new SEF base, with the simple function:

   	function jakeify($url)
   	{
   		if (defined('JAKE'))
   		{
   			// set this to the same SEF base defined in /.htaccess
   			$url = $this->jake->getSefUrl($url, '/app');
   		}
   		return $url;
   	}

Once you do this, your CakePHP URIs, running through Joomla, become the much friendlier /app/controllername/actionname instead of /components/jake/?jrun=controllername/actionname. You can still access the CakePHP URI’s directly via /webapp/controllername/actionname, just as before.