As the CakePHP framework grows in popularity, more and more tutorials are show up for it, including this quick and handy one from Graham Bird. In it, he explains the use of "slugs" instead of IDs to make URLs simpler to use and remember.

In this tutorial you will learn how to use words rather than IDs in your Cake URLs. These words are known as "slugs" in Wordpress so I decided to call them slugs too.

Cake's normal URLs look like this: www.example.com/stories/read/123245221
and we are going to make them look like this: www.example.com/stories/read/sleepingbeauty

Thanks to the simplicity of the framework, the tutorial is pretty short, using one of CakePHP's "magic functions" to help cross-match the slug given with a table in the database with a slug/title relationship. There's not much code to it and he provides a demo