CodeIgniter is great because you can separate your content from your styling with controllers, models, and views. Another great thing is when you create a website with CI, you automatically use friendly URLs (if you use an .htaccess file). If you have a bunch of unrelated pages however, you might wonder how you can keep those URLs as tiny as possible without having thirty different controllers for each page. For example, I have a CI application with a home controller that has about 20 different functions inside of it. To access each one of these functions, I would normally visit http://localhost/home/contact or http://localhost/home/about_us. Since we don’t really need home in the URL, I have found a way to remove it from the URL, still allowing other controllers to function normally. Here’s how to do it:
Open up your routes.php file inside the application/config folder in your CI app and add the following line to the end of the routes.php file:
$route['^(?!ezstore|ezsell|login).*'] = “home/$0″;
This line uses a regular expression that means, If a visitor goes to any url EXCEPT ezstore, ezsell, or login, redirect them to the home controller, and the function inside the home controller ($0). This way, every time we call a function from the home controller, such as contact, about_us, services, etc., we can snip home out of the URL and keep our URLs short and pretty.
The end!
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