The Bakery Everything CakePHP

I wanted to add a trailing slash to URLs in CakePHP. Why?

• There is speculation that it matters for SEO to have the trailing slash. For instance, Wordpress still has a trailing slash on URLs, which that community is obsessive with SEO practices so I look to them as a sort of de-facto standard.
• I wanted CakePHP to do my bidding and learn in the process about URL handling

In my app_helper.php, I over wrote the url function to check to see if there already is a trailing slash, or there is a file extension and then added the trailing slash if not.

Helper Class:

Download code <?php <?php
class AppHelper extends Helper {
    function url($url = null, $full = false) {
        $routerUrl = Router::url($url, $full);
        if (!preg_match('/\\.(rss|html|js|css|jpeg|jpg|gif|png|xml?)$/', strtolower($routerUrl)) && substr($routerUrl, -1) != '/') {
            $routerUrl .= '/';
        }
        return $routerUrl;
    }
}
?>?> You may need to add more file extensions if you use them.

I also added 301 redirects to include the trailing slash on URL requests in my app level .htaccess
Download code RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(\.[a-zA-Z0-9]{1,5}|/)$
#RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/$1/ [L,R=301]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/$1/ [L,R=301] You will need to change domain.com to your domain.

Whether or not it matters to add the trailing slash is speculative, however if you want to this is how I made it work.