What Is Routing?

The word ‘routing’ is used to refer to the mechanism by which website addresses (URLs) are mapped to particular modules, controllers and methods within Trongate’s architecture.

The Trongate framework favours a segment-based approach to URL routing.  This means that Trongate encourages the creation of web page URLs that are easy to read and search engine friendly.  This is in contrast with more traditional URL routing methods that might include symbols like question marks and equals signs.

Example

Let's assume that you're building a website that sells laptops.  With traditional URL routing techniques, your product pages may well end up having webpage URLs that look like this:

https://www.yoursite.com/store_items.php?item_id=35

However, by using Trongate's segment-based approach to routing, you can have product pages with URLs that look more like this:

​https://www.yoursite.com/store_items/thinkpad​

As you can see, the segment-based approach is considerably easier for both human beings and search engines to read!

Taking The Idea A Step Further

We can do even better! 

With Trongate, you can easily create rules that produce extremely readable and search engine friendly URLs.  For example:

https://www.yoursite.com/laptops/lenovo/thinkpad

The technique for producing these kinds of URLs is called 'custom routing' and it will be covered later on in this chapter.